Worth getting a new sound card?

tunis5000 · Post by **tunis5000** » Tue Feb 07, 2006 11:43 am

Heh, see the problem is not the video, I can change video options all day and not make much of a difference, it's the CPU cycles eaten up by the onboard audio, free those up and BAM, better performance. I'll be picking up a new sound card later on today, looking forward to checkin out how DOD runs tonight...

Post by **FlyingPenguin** » Tue Feb 07, 2006 2:55 pm

Well since I don't want to spend a lot of money, and an old SB Live 5.1 seemed to have made a major improvement on my old Athlon32 I went out and bought an SBlive 24 bit 7.1 card at Circuit City. It was only $30 (even Newegg sells it for $40). Going to pop that into the Athlon64 and see if it makes it smoother there as well.

Both these boards had the same AC'97 onboard audio chipset.

Post by **FlyingPenguin** » Tue Feb 07, 2006 6:24 pm

Okay, didn't make as much of a difference on the Athlon64 rig, but that was already pretty smooth. Subjectively it does seem better so I'll leave it in there. It definately made a big difference on the Athlon32 rig.

OH, Tunis, since you have an AGP card, are you using the PCI Latency Utility to tweak the video card? I post about it last year here, and I also mention it in my blog: http://soldcentralfl.com/flyingpenguin/ ... blog.shtml

Scroll down to "3/1/05 Adjusting Video Card PCI Latency To Dramatically Improve 3D Game Performance!"

Makes a big difference in subjective performance in most games.

tunis5000 · Post by **tunis5000** » Tue Feb 07, 2006 7:56 pm

Well I went to the local comp store I go to and he said the Audigy 2's are pretty much over with, he doesnt have any them anymore and they are harder to find, people either stay with onboard or get the new one, the X-Fi, so I got that one. The difference is amazing, not only does dod sound way better (I'm hearing things I didn't hear before), it runs better as well, I was able to turn graphics resolution and quality up and it still ran very well. It's amazing what a difference just getting a dedicated sound card can do. Now I can hold off on getting my vid card upgrade, I don't really need it as badly now.

I used that PCI Utility and it was already at 64 default, why I dunno, but thanks for that anyway...

Pugsley · Post by **Pugsley** » Wed Feb 08, 2006 2:32 am

Too bad they will never make a soundstorm audio card. thats the one thing i will allwys miss about my 8rda+. Altho turtelbeach seems to have a card thats verry close to what soundstorm used to be so i might just have to try one out.