Sound Card O/C and cooling

[Daovonnaex]

Does anyone know of a reference source for the cooling and overclocking of soundcards (No, I don't have any card in particular in mind)?

[Yodums]

I don't even think thats possible or necessary..

I mean if you can't notice much of a difference between 16bit and 24bit.. then not much of a point.

And waterblocks aren't that small for those lil chips.

[Kingslayer]

What changes when you change your FSB speed. Your PCI speed. If you are OCing your CPU with a FSB change, you are then at the same time overclocking your sound card. Do you need to cool it. Probably not. But at the same time I'm telling you this I'm looking at my 3Com 3C905 NIC card with a greenie and 486 fan on it....

[Daovonnaex]

Originally posted by Kingslayer
What changes when you change your FSB speed. Your PCI speed. If you are OCing your CPU with a FSB change, you are then at the same time overclocking your sound card. Do you need to cool it. Probably not. But at the same time I'm telling you this I'm looking at my 3Com 3C905 NIC card with a greenie and 486 fan on it.... I know that overclocking the FSB affects the sound card, but I'm curious as to see if there's anyway to directly overclock the sound card.

[Dark Illusion]

O/C'ing your sound card would *not* make it output higher bitrates. That's like saying O/C'ing a videocard would make it output a more detailed image=) The only thing you might get is be able to stream more sounds.

[Daovonnaex]

Originally posted by Dark Illusion
O/C'ing your sound card would *not* make it output higher bitrates. That's like saying O/C'ing a videocard would make it output a more detailed image=) The only thing you might get is be able to stream more sounds. I know very well that it wouldn't increase the bitrate, but I am curious as to how it would handle the sound streaming, wavetable, and voices.

[Dark Illusion]

As far as I know, increasing the bus speed is O/C'ing your PCI a bit. I also remember 3rd party drivers made for the SBLive! It might or might not have anything to do with what we're talking about. If someone here is an avid digital studio'er and uses a SBLive they could tell you. If not, google is always worth a shot.

[Monaco]

I consider myself an audio geek- when it comes to sound cards,

overclock=bad

Really. The farther away from a standard bus speed you get, the more likely you are to get hisses, crackling, and popping noises on whatever you are listening to. If you've got all your card's inputs and outputs filled, and are trying to work with them, an overclocked sound card can be sheer hell.

They really seem to hate the nonstandard PCI bus quite a bit. So,whenever I am recording or anything, I just flip my Celeron 566 from 995 back to 850 (117mhz FSB to 100Mhz), and problems go away. This is with both an SBlive and a Mona pro stereo card.

I have yet to find a way to modify a sound card for better performance, it's a long story as to why but there isn't any easy way except get a better card.