PCA Forums

I swapped out my sblive plat 5.1 card and pawned it, bought a nice new modem, and pocketed a few $$ now i have to use the integrated sound on my epox 8K9A3+ I installed the latest drivers from the epox website.. and for some reson, the volume and quality are unresonibly poor. I can't get the volume much higher than a whisper, and the qualtiy is like a old beat up zilophone (forgive the spelling). I asked around, and i got an answer, "reinstall the codecs and then install new drivers." well, I can't honestly say i've done that, but I'de much rather not have to reinstall windows 2K, and i've got several hours worth of service packs in her.... and no, it's not my cheap $4 headset's fault. (can't go wrong with wall-mart )

Most onboard sound, from my experience, requires you use some kind of 'powered" output device. Simply plugging in a set of headphones or regular speakers (that don't have their own power source) won't get you any noise above that "whisper" you're currently experiencing. Find you some powered speakers at walmard for $15, I have some Altec Lansings that do the job fine, and that should fix the problem. eGo

Is it an AC97 sound chip? In my experience they have VERY low volume - too low to even drive headphones properly. I also wasn't impressed with the quality.

I installed a cheap CMedia card on my Lan party Epox mobo because I had that problem.

Onboard CMedia chips sound MUCH better.

yes, ac97 chip, but here's the thing, I used the ac97 sound on my athlon 650 box, and it sounds just fine. my soltek motherboard, that i used to use. it was also ac97, sounded fine too. explain that will you? I am going to reinstall winblows, and see if it works, i've yet to try all of this in linux, see if tux will sooth my sound woes

I've listened to 4 different mobos with AC97 sound and they all sucked. Very weak audio and distorted unless amplified.

I've been told the newer AC97 audio is better. I prefer CMedia though.

You may be causing yourself more un-needed troubles.. Powered speakers could very well fix the issue.. GL either way.. eGo

what's a good cheapy cmedia card (PCI) and were could i get it? i have to keep my head phones

Here's one with the good 8738 chipset for $11: http://store.yahoo.com/directron/av5121.html

You might check out the local mom & pop computer stores as well.

Powered speakers definatley help. I too had to use earphones (it was a LAN party rig) and I would take some powered Harmon Karmon speakers with me that had a headphone jack on them.

But it became a pain - I saw no reason why a card couldn't provide enough power (we're talking 50 milliwatts for goodness sake!) to run headphones.

'ight, thanks for the assistance. I probly shouldn't have done away with my poor sblive eh? oh well. good price, thx for the link.

You're better off without that SB Live. I was ELATED to get rid of mine. POS was full of IRQ issues. Only way I could get it to work properly on my Win2K system was to disable ACPI. It was also cursed with driver issues.

My CMedia 8738 sounds just as good with no resource or driver hassles.