is my TURTLE BEACH SANTA CRUZ sound card better than ASUS boards onboard sound?

"puck" wrote in
message ...
i have used a turtle beach santa cruz sound card for the last four
years. although it has 5.1 but i use it as a 4.1 setup.

i am in the process of putting together a new system with the
following asus motherboard -
http://uk.asus.com/products4.aspx?l1...&modelmen u=1

not that i need a free pci slot or anything like that, but was
wondering if the onbaord sound on this board is equal or better than
my turtle beach card. in the bad old days onboard sound used to be
rubbish but a review of the motherboard i read stated that the sound
quality is better than $50 sound cards. a link to the review is also
provided below -
http://www.sysopt.com/reviews/asus-P4C800-E_Deluxe/



What I want to know is whether on-board sound uses any more processor time
than a dedicated soundcard using the same sound chip.

ss.

Yes it does. Use a seperate sound card


"Synapse Syndrome" wrote in message
...

"puck" wrote in
message ...
i have used a turtle beach santa cruz sound card for the last four
years. although it has 5.1 but i use it as a 4.1 setup.

i am in the process of putting together a new system with the
following asus motherboard -
http://uk.asus.com/products4.aspx?l1...&modelmen u=1

not that i need a free pci slot or anything like that, but was
wondering if the onbaord sound on this board is equal or better than
my turtle beach card. in the bad old days onboard sound used to be
rubbish but a review of the motherboard i read stated that the sound
quality is better than $50 sound cards. a link to the review is also
provided below -
http://www.sysopt.com/reviews/asus-P4C800-E_Deluxe/



What I want to know is whether on-board sound uses any more processor time
than a dedicated soundcard using the same sound chip.

ss.

On Mon, 8 Aug 2005 13:01:25 +0000 (UTC), "Synapse Syndrome"
wrote:


"puck" wrote in
message ...
i have used a turtle beach santa cruz sound card for the last four
years. although it has 5.1 but i use it as a 4.1 setup.

i am in the process of putting together a new system with the
following asus motherboard -
http://uk.asus.com/products4.aspx?l1...&modelmen u=1

not that i need a free pci slot or anything like that, but was
wondering if the onbaord sound on this board is equal or better than
my turtle beach card. in the bad old days onboard sound used to be
rubbish but a review of the motherboard i read stated that the sound
quality is better than $50 sound cards. a link to the review is also
provided below -
http://www.sysopt.com/reviews/asus-P4C800-E_Deluxe/



What I want to know is whether on-board sound uses any more processor time
than a dedicated soundcard using the same sound chip.


No, but why would you want a sound card with the same chip?

The same chip will have exact same CPU utilization on a
card, and when it's on the motherboard (unlike southbridge
integrated sound support) it's even on the PCI bus just like
the card would be.

Primarily the card "might" give you better analog filtering
because it has more room for the filter circuitry. That's
always true though, some cards are very cheap and
minimalistic compared to other cards.

On Mon, 08 Aug 2005 17:18:10 GMT, kony
wrote:

Primarily the card "might" give you better analog filtering
because it has more room for the filter circuitry. That's
always true though, some cards are very cheap and
minimalistic compared to other cards.

Correction: above should have read "That's NOT always true
though,..."

"kony" wrote in message
...
On Mon, 8 Aug 2005 13:01:25 +0000 (UTC), "Synapse Syndrome"
wrote:
What I want to know is whether on-board sound uses any more processor
time than a dedicated soundcard using the same sound chip.

No, but why would you want a sound card with the same chip?

The same chip will have exact same CPU utilization on a
card, and when it's on the motherboard (unlike southbridge
integrated sound support) it's even on the PCI bus just like
the card would be.

I would have thought sound support integrated into the southbridge still
appears like a device on the PCI bus. How else would it work?

Alex

On Tue, 9 Aug 2005 00:02:30 +0100, "Alex Fraser"
wrote:



I would have thought sound support integrated into the southbridge still
appears like a device on the PCI bus. How else would it work?


The PCI bus on a (southbridge-equipped) chipset merely
connected the PCI devices TO the southbridge. The
southbridge can (and does now) have integral features that
have no need to connect to an external (PCI) bus but rather
more directly connect to the northbridge.

PCI bus connects two (or more) chips. If sound is integral
to the southbridge, what on the PCI bus would it then need
to connect to? The digitized audio leaves the southbridge
on separate traces to go to the codec, it is a serial bus
with no other functionality nor data bandwidth issues to
resolve.