Shoutbox

Hi,

Just wondering, if I'm watching a movie on my pc would it matter if I had an onboard vs non onboard sound card for sound quality?

No....

That is when you compare the onboard stuff with equivalent soundcards. If you do that, then no, there is no difference at all.


Of course, it speaks for its own that if you have a high classed fancy gold plated 7.1 soundcard and using it together with a super-duper amplifier and a 1000W multi-speaker system that you'll probably have a better sound. But in that case you're not comparing stuff in a fair way.


Onboard sound is in almost all cases extremely good (unless you're a real movie-fanatic or working professionally with sounds, then nothing is good enough )

i have onboard sound and it sounds good on my pc, maybe cause its conected to a 600w amp with 7 speakers and sub. but theres really no differnce atall between onboard and non onboard. just depends what its connected to really

thanks you just saved me a bunch of money thanks

quote:

---

Originally posted by Dazmatic
i have onboard sound and it sounds good on my pc, maybe cause its conected to a 600w amp with 7 speakers and sub. but theres really no differnce atall between onboard and non onboard. just depends what its connected to really

---

Well not necessarily, if you compare a sound card from 10 years ago and one in your everyday modern computer you would see that the sound quality would be different and that what ever is connected to the sound card is not the only thing influencing the sound quality.

quote:

---

Originally posted by Dazmatic
theres really no differnce atall between onboard and non onboard

---

Not quite true. Onboard soundcards are generally made to a lesser budget than an ann-in card, and add-in cards potentially have much more potential. Escpecially if you invest in a top-flight professional soundcard.

Though for 99.99% of the population, they won't be able to hear the difference.

quote:

---

Originally posted by RaceProUK
Escpecially if you invest in a top-flight professional soundcard.

---

Of course, but then you are not comparing the same stuff....

There is no difference between a normal budget soundcard and a onboard soundcard.

------------

It is not like a graphics card which maybe supports hardware rendering and shadowing and what not while an onboard card doesn't. But even then, the stuff which is outputted from a onboard graphics card is just the same as a high classed graphics card: pixels. Essencially it only is a matter of how fast it does it and what the card supports of special commands (so the software doesn't need todo it; thus again speed issues)...

With sound this is just the same; what is outputted is just the same sound. And the factor speed isn't an issue here. It is not like an onboard soundcard is going to mangle up the sound or play it more slowly or whatever.

For sound, the difference lies in the quality of the hardware contacts and stuff, but that shouldn't change anything to the sound. It only may matter after very long (ab)use where the contact doesn't give contact enough anymore. Another difference might be the amount of output channels, but again, sound is sound.

With all this I don't say there are no differences, but the difference are so small, even with comparing an onboard stereo soundcard and a top notch stereo external card, you wont hear a tad difference.

In fact, the major factor in sound are actually the speakers.

If you're a gamer with a decent machine and want all the performance you can get, having a good sound card can improve performance, simply because instead of the cpu having to process any high quality sounds, the sound card's processor does it. This only really applies to newer games which use high quality sounds =p