onboard sound chip: advice needed

  • Thread starter Thread starter jackson marshmallow
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J

jackson marshmallow

Could someone recommend a fast full duplex onboard sound chip, or a
motherboard with such a chip?

I hope to find something with reasonably good audio quality but don't expect
too much. The focus is speed, so I can do pseudo-realtime processing. The
software I'm going to use is W2k, WDM drivers, and Sonar 3.

I read that onboard sound system can potentially be faster because there are
no PCI bus limitations...

I tried a Sonar 3 demo briefly on a Dell Optiplex GX260, which has an
onboard SoundMax chip, and could get the mixing latency down to 10 ms, which
is _almost_ as good as I need...

Thanks id advance!
 
Onboard sound chipsets are on the PCI bus. The speed of sound cards should not vary much when using one or two channels since all they need to do is convert between digital and analog. If you are using MIDI or surround sound then there is a lot more processing involved. The mixing speed depends on other things, such as your application and processor speed.
 
jackson marshmallow said:
Could someone recommend a fast full duplex onboard sound chip, or a
motherboard with such a chip?

I hope to find something with reasonably good audio quality but don't expect
too much. The focus is speed, so I can do pseudo-realtime processing. The
software I'm going to use is W2k, WDM drivers, and Sonar 3.

I read that onboard sound system can potentially be faster because there are
no PCI bus limitations...

I tried a Sonar 3 demo briefly on a Dell Optiplex GX260, which has an
onboard SoundMax chip, and could get the mixing latency down to 10 ms, which
is _almost_ as good as I need...

Thanks id advance!
Click to expand...

Well, I don't know if the PCI bus is that slow, since you can run
harddrives, etc. off of them with a controller card. Maybe there is
something I don't know about, but it seems to me that all top quality
PCI cards work well, so probably a $20-$50 card will suffice for you.
I don't know why you want an integrated sound solution, other than the
cost factor.

Aaron
 
Onboard sound actually has more lag than a separate soundcard. The onboard
audio chip shares CPU cycles with the rest of the hardware in the computer,
unlike a separate sound card which has its own audio processing unit and so
doesn't draw down the CPU speed.
 
DaveW said:
Onboard sound actually has more lag than a separate soundcard. The onboard
audio chip shares CPU cycles with the rest of the hardware in the computer,
unlike a separate sound card which has its own audio processing unit and so
doesn't draw down the CPU speed.
Click to expand...

I've Heard that the nforce2 chipset supports really decent 5.1 sound
if your looking for an AMD socket A motherboard, if not a separate
sound card is always nice, I recommend Creative Labs Audigy2 zs.
 
jackson marshmallow said:
Could someone recommend a fast full duplex onboard sound chip, or a
motherboard with such a chip?
Click to expand...

My asrock K7S8X was good till i broke it.. btw its for athlon processors.
 
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