What sound card to get?

[cre8tive Delay]

I'm using creative soundblaster products for about 17 years or so now and never ever had one single problem to complain about.
AAA sound here with an first gen X-Fi right now.

Went through DOS 5.0 to 6.1, win 95, ME, XP, Vista 32 and 64 Bit as well as Windows 7 64.
I never had a single issue with creative drivers.
Friends often had different products and I always came to the conclusion, that my soundblaster sounds better and is more accessible than any other stuff. I'm fully satisfied for ages now.

Can only recommend creative from my point of view.
Face it

[Katana1000S]

Originally Posted by cre8tive Delay

I'm using creative soundblaster products for about 17 years or so now and never ever had one single problem to complain about.
AAA sound here with an first gen X-Fi right now.

Went through DOS 5.0 to 6.1, win 95, ME, XP, Vista 32 and 64 Bit as well as Windows 7 64.
I never had a single issue with creative drivers.
Friends often had different products and I always came to the conclusion, that my soundblaster sounds better and is more accessible than any other stuff. I'm fully satisfied for ages now.

Can only recommend creative from my point of view.
Face it

LoL cre8tive Delay I've never seen a sound card fan boy before

Do you work for Creative Labs? But hey ... if it works for you fair play.

[Robotic Pope]

Originally Posted by Katana1000S

LoL cre8tive Delay I've never seen a sound card fan boy before

Do you work for Creative Labs? But hey ... if it works for you fair play.

lol. He does have a point though. Soundblaster was almost the default for dos games back then, it was semi plug and play. If you had a generic sound card you almost allways had to mess with IRQs and DMAs to get the damn thing to work. Ah the fun of making boot disks.

[Katana1000S]

Originally Posted by Robotic Pope

lol. He does have a point though. Soundblaster was almost the default for dos games back then, it was semi plug and play. If you had a generic sound card you almost allways had to mess with IRQs and DMAs to get the damn thing to work. Ah the fun of making boot disks.

Oh I agree, I go back to DOS 5 as well, owned quite a few Sounblaster's in my time, under this very desk is an old P200 with a Matrox card and an original 3DFX mk 1 card I've put together for nostalgia with DOS 6.22 on it as an OS, folk these days have no idea of the hassle we had back then, trying to free up enough conventional memory to run Strike Commander and such like, fun though.

Much as Creative have had some good cards, they have made some garbage too, also there was that case where they lost a lot of customers when they tried to stop a third party guy making free drivers for Audigy's and such like that Creative refused to carry on supporting for Vista I think it was, they backed down on that one, they had to.

I don't think I'd ever support any bit of silicon to the hilt, as soon as I see something better I'll go for it, no brand loyalty here

[cre8tive Delay]

Originally Posted by Katana1000S

LoL cre8tive Delay I've never seen a sound card fan boy before

Do you work for Creative Labs? But hey ... if it works for you fair play.

as for my nick: this is only a coincidence and has got nothing to do with creative labs

But you are right, I'm a fanboy to put it that way. But my mood could easily change if I would run into problems with creative labs sometime. My money will always be invested properly, even if that means to change my brand
--
As to onboard sound: unless you have a decent soundprocessor on your mainboard, never go with onboard sound. The sound might be ok nowadys but the performance isn't. Your CPU has got to process sound here.
Using a soundcard frees ur CPU and that way increases your fps
Also, a onboard soundcard is most likely not capable of bringing you complex sound effects or precise surrond positioning.

[cre8tive Delay]

Sorry for quoting myself but it just fits:

@Oldschool61:

Originally Posted by cre8tive Delay

As to onboard sound: unless you have a decent soundprocessor on your mainboard, never go with onboard sound. The sound might be ok nowadys but the performance isn't. Your CPU has got to process sound here.
Using a soundcard frees ur CPU and that way increases your fps
Also, a onboard soundcard is most likely not capable of bringing you complex sound effects or precise surrond positioning.

[Katana1000S]

Originally Posted by cre8tive Delay

As to onboard sound: unless you have a decent soundprocessor on your mainboard, never go with onboard sound. The sound might be ok nowadys but the performance isn't. Your CPU has got to process sound here.
Using a soundcard frees ur CPU and that way increases your fps
Also, a onboard soundcard is most likely not capable of bringing you complex sound effects or precise surrond positioning.

Agreed, I've always leaned towards performance PC builds with high end motherboards, but even the best of them with on-board sound do not compare to a dedicated quality sound-card that does its own processing and leaves the CPU to do the work on the sim ... it always amazes me how some guys will spend thousands on a PC build but cut corners in this area ... one of my friends did exactly this, I asked him why he never pushed the boat and got a decent sound card and speakers too, he said he'd rather spend that money on neon lights multi colour fans and cathodes to light the inside of the PC, I just said "Oh" ... never told him it looked like a Circus for fear of hurting his feelings LoL. he's now getting an expensive custom paint job on its case done ... each to their own I guess.

[III/JG11_Simmox]

Creative XiFi external USB
plus eDimension ForceFeedBack headphones,no contest
best gaming experience ive had so far

[Oldschool61]

Originally Posted by cre8tive Delay

--
As to onboard sound: unless you have a decent soundprocessor on your mainboard, never go with onboard sound. The sound might be ok nowadys but the performance isn't. Your CPU has got to process sound here.
Using a soundcard frees ur CPU and that way increases your fps Also, a onboard soundcard is most likely not capable of bringing you complex sound effects or precise surrond positioning.

This isnt completely true. If you use software "rendering" it is but most onboard sound now is a chip just like on yopur PCI card so in reality your not losing fps. The only thing is a difference in quality and audio features from the sound chip. The term onboard sound refers to a sound processing chip just like your add in card but usually of lower quality, but still not CPU intensive. Several years ago that idea may have held true but not so much today.

[ICDP]

The difference between onboard and dedicated SC is narrower than it was years ago but the difference is still night and day. Why anyone would pay hundreds of dollars/pounds for a new rig and then use onboard SC is beyond me. "It's good enough" is the usual reply, but anyone who has tried a good SC compared to onboard usually never goes back to onboard.

I am using a Xonar DX, the positional audio and range of sounds from it compared to onboard is amazing. See this review from a few years ag o for the Xonar DX, the listening tests mostly apply to music but I found the same for games. For example in my tests on Rise of Flight the onboard sound was tinny and lacked range compared to the Xonar DX.

http://techreport.com/articles.x/14500/6