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I'm looking to buy a sound card, and I need advice, because I'm not entirely sure what all does what.

This card will be for gaming/music and will probably be connected to these speakers

7 Candidates

I'm confused because the cheapest card (Chaintech) has the highest sampling rate, matched only by the most expensive. It also has a ton of good reviews.

Is hardware acceleration going to make a lot of difference on a sound card?


Recommendations or advice, anyone?

EDIT: And the Santa Cruz only has 20bit digital audio whereas all the others have 24...

Is the AOpen card a good brand?

From those choices I would pay attention to the ratings and reviews of the cards. Seems like the most reviews were done on the cheapest and the most expensive card.

If you have the cash, get the SB Audigy 2. If restricted by your budget, get the Chaintech.

Edit: That speaker choice should have no problem with any of those cards.

Turtle Beach makes decent sound cards.

hmmm....

after reading this article I'm leaning toward buying the Riviera 6 (5.1)

But I'm still feeling a bit weary about the 48KHz sampling rate... I don't suppose you can OC a sound card?

Do you need a game port? If not, you could go for the Catalina.

I think I may spring for the Catalina 8... and I may even get the retail instead of OEM, because retail comes bundled with some nice software

Hmm.... I may go with the Chaintech though. I'm basing that decision off this:



Same VIA Envy chipset. And I don't see any noticeable ICs on the Catalina that could be an additional processor...

Plus I just lectured a guy on being thrifty.

The sound card market is dying, most new computers have built in 7.1 sound on the motherboard.

I for one did not see any reason to spend the extra buck on a sound card.

~Edit Typo

Well, I was looking into a sound card because I'd read that there's an unavoidable amount of crosstalk/interference from integrated sound.

But you know what? You're right, screw the sound card, at least for now. My motherboard has 6 channel audio, I can use that for now and can always order a sound card in the future.

Jaepheth wrote:Well, I was looking into a sound card because I'd read that there's an unavoidable amount of crosstalk/interference from integrated sound.

But you know what? You're right, screw the sound card, at least for now. My motherboard has 6 channel audio, I can use that for now and can always order a sound card in the future.

I have not heard any crosstalk or interference but then again my speakers are small crappy ones hanging under the monitor.

Most of my games are either a gunshot or a ping in SilentHunter III and those speakers are quite good enuff for that.

From experiance though, if you want good sound and don't mind headphones, USB headphones typically include a sound chip thats better then onboard sound.

The Chaintech AV710 has a very good stereo output but its other channels are not so good. It is cheap, however. If your primary purpose is gaming you might want to consider a low-end Audigy 2.

Jaepheth wrote:Well, I was looking into a sound card because I'd read that there's an unavoidable amount of crosstalk/interference from integrated sound.

That becomes a non-issue if you have an S/PDIF output on your motherboard and a set of speakers capable of receiving it.

Jaepheth wrote:Same VIA Envy chipset. And I don't see any noticeable ICs on the Catalina that could be an additional processor...

The Catalina might have a better Envy chipset -- there are a half-dozen different 'grades' of them -- and the Catalina might also have better DACs as well.

Faram wrote:The sound card market is dying, most new computers have built in 7.1 sound on the motherboard.

I for one did not see any reason to spend the extra buck on a sound card.

~Edit Typo

When I upgraded my motherboard back in December, I saw that shiny 7.1 onboard sound with optical out and everything, and I thought to myself "sweet, that's one less PCI slot I have to have populated".

After a week, I swapped my old Santa Cruz back in, and immediately noticed a substantial improvement of sound quality both on my headphones and on my old 2.1 speaker set from 1998.

Granted, my motherboard isn't one of those nice shiny nForce boards, but it still goes to show that just because it's 7.1 and feature-laden doesn't mean you're going to get great sound out of it.

Though this is a heavily biased opinion, I really like Creative and absolutely adore Audigy. Though I haven't bought a soundcard in a number of years so things may have changed, but I remember their quality was always very solid, and the sound was golden.

I my Turtle Beach Santa Cruz.