Best performance sound solution?

[joe7dust]

I want to know partly to squeeze every last drop of performance from my system, and partly out of curiousity. How does performance relate to which sound option you're using? (onboard vs. PCI vs. USB vs. HDMI from your video card)

I used to have an HP-pulled quadcore board with crappy onboard sound so I grabbed a Turtle Beach USB 'sound card'. Very simple, just a dongle with the green audio out and pink microphone jack.

Anyways, now I have a much nicer motherboard and it has 8.1 audio on it. It is 24-bit up to 120,000Hz or some ridiculous amount. I used to have a PCI Audigy 2 for many years and it was great because of the new HD quality sound (24-bit) at the time. Since the Hz is same or better and its also 24-bit I'm thinking this onboard audio will suffice for me.

I'm mainly just curious I guess, would I see a slight increase in FPS in my games if I offloaded some of the sound processing to a USB device? I'm not even sure that offloading is actually occuring in this situation to be honest...

Also my Radeon HD 5850 has HDMI audio output on it... how would performance/quality differ if I choose to use that and disable the onboard audio in BIOS?

Right now it is handy to use DVI video to my 1080p plasma and 3.5mm to my 300watt 2.1 system. If I started using HDMI I'd have to use the crappy speakers on my tv or some sort of splitter/adapter to get a 3.5mm line-out from the HDMI.

I mainly play starcraft 2 on ultra settings maxed. Trying to get the highest FPS possible with max quality as well as low pings for online matches.

Before you laugh and say the sound option I choose won't affect my performance much enough to worry about it, check out the sound options in SC2. They have low-mid-high as well as between 16 to 100 simultaneous sound channels. With High setting and 100 channels the CPU bottleneck becomes quite noticeable. (at least with my old crap quad-core and USB sound'card') Although 16 channels on medium would probably be fine, I'd also like to know for IT knowledge purposes. It's how I make a living.

 

[e6600]

onboard uses much more cpu time than a dedicated card would

pci cards, it depends.. auzentech and creative cards are hardware based and share the x-fi chip, which really helps performance wise
other cards like asus xonars are software based and might have even higher cpu usage than onboard. but you get much better sound quality with music and movies, but lack eax and other gaming features

usb, i dont really know anything about. though usb headsets are really crappy, in fact all headsets are crap

hdmi afaik are very similar to onboard with sq and cpu usage. but sound quality depends on the type of gpu, big difference between a 480gtx and 4850

 

[joe7dust]

onboard uses much more cpu time than a dedicated card would

pci cards, it depends.. auzentech and creative cards are hardware based and share the x-fi chip, which really helps performance wise
other cards like asus xonars are software based and might have even higher cpu usage than onboard. but you get much better sound quality with music and movies, but lack eax and other gaming features

usb, i dont really know anything about. though usb headsets are really crappy, in fact all headsets are crap

hdmi afaik are very similar to onboard with sq and cpu usage. but sound quality depends on the type of gpu, big difference between a 480gtx and 4850

I got more details and a day or two faster in another thread, but thankyou. Lesson: always have a backup plan!

P.s. there are a couple unanswered questions still if you'd like to join in. http://www.techsupportforum.com/har...rmance-vs-board-pci-usb-hdmi.html#post2902827

 

[joe7dust]

I had a Gigabyte 880gm-ud2h and the onboard audio was AMAZING, decided to upgrade to i5 760 cpu but Gigabytes Intel board was $40 more for some reason so I got a Biostar.

Now there is 'noise' no matter what my speaker volume is set at... looks like I'll have to go back to using my USB. Sad too cause the 8.1 on my gigabyte was better than this turtle beach usb sound.

 

[joe7dust]

I had a Gigabyte 880gm-ud2h and the onboard audio was AMAZING, decided to upgrade to i5 760 cpu but Gigabytes Intel board was $40 more for some reason so I got a Biostar.

Now there is 'noise' no matter what my speaker volume is set at... looks like I'll have to go back to using my USB. Sad too cause the 8.1 on my gigabyte was better than this turtle beach usb sound.

Sound randomly stopped working! Went to update drivers got a CRC error, going to buy a SSD drive cause it looks like mine is possibly bad and I've wanted one for awhile now anyways. It's either that or my mobo... if its the latter I'm replacing this P.o.S. also.