Thread: PCI Soundcard or Onboard?

My motherboard has a Realtek Azalia built in sound card and I also have an Audigy2 Value hanging around...

which would you use and why?

Probably a wash. Probably pretty similar in sound performance. Take your pick.

which one will be less of a drag on system resources?

the audigy2. it's going to do better on EAX/sound positioning anyway.

The 'value' cards arnt much to write home about, both will probably have a similar (an similarly unnoticeable) resource footprint.
But ya go with the audigy. At the very least it will allow you to enable the EAX stuff as big pointed out.

Good deal. Thanks!

While the sound quality from either wont vary much (newer onboard solutions have decent sound typically) the onboard sound takes up cpu cycles to do its work.

In one of my older machines (AMD FX-60, dual 6800 GT, 2GB DDR400) my game performance took a noticeable jump in BF2 when I installed a sound card. Specifically an Audigy 2. That mobo had the same integrated sound solution you have I believe.

I would opt for the external solution to take some of the load off the CPU. Plus, you can probably turn up audio settings higher. I did that in BF2; when using the integrated sound I could not turn it up past "low" without major laggy-jaggies. But when I popped the Audigy in there I could turn it up to high with no problem.