Hardware & Technical Sound card or No? Opinions sought.

[Broon]

So I'm going to do an AMD build this weekend. All the parts are bought but I am waiting on the final piece, an M.2 2280 SSD.

I am utilizing some parts from my current system and one of the old parts is a Sound Blaster Audigy Fx card. I have been trying to decide whether to include this card in the new setup or if I should try going with the onboard audio on my new motherboard.

My old Dell MB has crap audio hence the sound card but I hear tell that on board audio has come to be better than crap lately. I am seeking opinions for or against including the sound card in the build.

The sound card.

The new mother board.


EDIT....I don't have a 7.1 surround speaker setup and have no plans to do that upgrade so take that out of the equation. Think 5.1 only.

What do y'all think?


The build is going to be.....

Ryzen 7 2700x
AsRock Fatal1ty X470 Gaming K4 mother board
Corsair Vengeance RGB Pro 16GB DDR4 3200
EVGA FTW2 GTX 1080
XPG 240GB NVM2 Gen3 x4 SSD boot drive
EVGA SuperNova G3 750w PSU
Seagate Barracuda 4TB Storage
WD Blue 1TB game drive
Rosewill Mid Tower case

 

[Frank]

I got a new system recently. I decided to go with the motherboard's sound system. I'm not exactly an audiophile, but it sounds okay to me.

Seeing as you're getting that motherboard anyway, why not just try it out and see what you think? You still have the soundcard if you find it's not good enough.

 

[The Chairmaker]

i would say that in that particular case the onboard sound looks better than the discreet sound card.

However if you wanted to go full audiophile then discreet sound cards will be better, however you would be shelling out £150+ for the top notch stuff, something like what ive linked to below, which goes for £250

https://www.asus.com/Sound-Cards/Essence_STX_II_71/

 

[Bill Clement]

Nice place to be- having options is a good thing.

Why wouldn't you use the card, if it's available and you have space in your build for it? I get that new motherboards are supposed to have decent sound, but if you've got a dedicated card on hand, it seems like a moot point.

Do you have power or airflow concerns? Would it get in the way of your cable management? Are you concerned about the look of the system?

I'm just not seeing any downsides to using what you've already got.

Disclaimer- I'm Scottish, value for money and getting as much wear as possible out of any purchase are national characteristics. My English friends call this 'being tight'? :S

 

[Broon]

Awesome! So far we've got a "Keep the card just in case", a "Stick with the onboard sound", and a "Use the card since you already have it".

I have considered all three of those options but I don't have a three sided coin. LOL So I am still up in the air.

i would say that in that particular case the onboard sound looks better than the discreet sound card.

However if you wanted to go full audiophile then discreet sound cards will be better, however you would be shelling out £150+ for the top notch stuff, something like what ive linked to below, which goes for £250

https://www.asus.com/Sound-Cards/Essence_STX_II_71/

When I bought the Audigy FX I had considered higher end cards but my budget wasn't allowing that at the time. Plus I believe I would need higher end speakers to be able to exploit all of a better cards potential. It's a good thought though, especially if I was set up in a larger room.

Nice place to be- having options is a good thing.

Why wouldn't you use the card, if it's available and you have space in your build for it? I get that new motherboards are supposed to have decent sound, but if you've got a dedicated card on hand, it seems like a moot point.

Do you have power or airflow concerns? Would it get in the way of your cable management? Are you concerned about the look of the system?

I'm just not seeing any downsides to using what you've already got.

Disclaimer- I'm Scottish, value for money and getting as much wear as possible out of any purchase are national characteristics. My English friends call this 'being tight'? :S

Airflow, power needs and case room are not inhibiting factors. I even have PCI slot covers coming to fill the unused holes when things move around since the case only has the snap off, non replaceable ones.


I am a Midwestern US country boy and a penny-pincher to boot. I will use the hell out of something before it goes on the burn pile or out to the scrap yard which is why I am utilizing my current case, GPU and spin drives in the new build. It's not being "tight", it's being smart. If it ain't broken, don't fix it kind of thing.

To that end the old system will get stuffed back into the stock Dell case and either repurposed to a HTPC or given to someone who needs a PC. I'm just upgrading with the times and looking to make the leap into VR.

 

[Caramel Clown]

For regular day-to-day media consumption like movies, music, games - hell no. There's just no point. On-board audio these days is actually adequate. As in - actually quite good in many cases.
I really see no reason to go with discreet audio these days, unless you have very specific needs. Sound and music recording comes to mind. Especially if you are on the move, and might work on different systems having your own interface/external card is quite handy.

 

[GJ51]

My recollection is that the Audigy FX boards were very high quality and most onboard audio probably isn't as good partly due to crosstalk on the onboard circuitry. If your board is not particularly advertising a very high end option, my suspicion is that the Audigy card is likely much better and will give you a cleaner sound.

My son is a violinist with perfect pitch and my old Audigy card is in his system...

Personally, I probably can't hear the difference

 

[Morbad]

That's a modern board with a well isolated audio system featuring a modern codec (a Realtek ALC1220) that has very clean DACs for the segment. While I'd need to see the specific implementation tested, I would not be surprised if most objective measurements revealed the onboard to have similar or higher fidelity compared to the Audigy FX. There are certainly implementations of the ALC 1220 that will do better in actual, measured, fidelity than the Audigy FX claims to do in it's paper stats. This should not be surprising, because the Audigy FX is a very budget oriented solution itself.

In raw analog sound quality, you would have to have a pretty high-end sound system or set of can and be exceptionally picky (an audiophile) to be able to hear any consistent differences and you might not prefer the sound card in any case.

Driver wise, I'd rather have the onboard that let me omit anything Creative (the Cinema 5 is just a Creative software licence that comes with some Realtek implementations and you can use Realtek's drivers, or a generic Windows driver, instead) than be locked into Creative's drivers via their own hardware.

My recollection is that the Audigy FX boards were very high quality and most onboard audio probably isn't as good partly due to crosstalk on the onboard circuitry. If your board is not particularly advertising a very high end option, my suspicion is that the Audigy card is likely much better and will give you a cleaner sound.

Same CODEC implemented in a similar segment of board to what the OP's is:

The Audigy FX: http://stephan.win31.de/rmaa/audfx/audfx-front-rear-direct.htm

Unless ASRock really screwed something up, the onboard is actually significantly better.

 

[Asp Explorer]

That's a modern board with a well isolated audio system featuring a modern codec

The sad thing is - I can't remember being excited about installing a sound card since the SoundBlaster Live! days

The AWE32 with SIMM slots and three? competing CD-ROM interfaces was perhaps my favourite one of all.

 

[Morbad]

The sad thing is - I can't remember being excited about installing a sound card since the SoundBlaster Live! days

Well, after Aureal died, good positional audio went with it and any performance to be gained from offloading audio work in games disappeared with the Windows Vista/7 audio stack and increasing CPU performance.

The only thing left was raw analog output quality, and onboard has been steadily improving to the point that you now need a sound card that costs twice as much as the motherboard to have a good chance at besting the onboard's analog quality.

The AWE32 with SIMM slots and three? competing CD-ROM interfaces was perhaps my favourite one of all.

My AWE32 melted a few years back, but my retro gaming PC has both an AWE64 Gold (for DOS MIDI) and an Aureal Vortex 2 SQ2500 rev B for A3D 2.0 positional audio in Windows 95/98 games.

The AWE32/64 were really the best bang for the buck for MIDI music in the mid 90s. Sure Roland was/is better, but they cost a fortune. Though there are apparently some good Roland emulators and plugins for DOSBox now...

 

[Asp Explorer]

My AWE32 melted a few years back

Now, that is a sad thing to hear. Condolences.

There was something just so cool about a sound card you could shove RAM on (4Mb on mine if I remember right) and cheekily add a IDE hard drive if you could deal with the ISA speed.

And it was simply a beautiful board.

 

[Morbad]

Now, that is a sad thing to hear. Condolences.

There was something just so cool about a sound card you could shove RAM on (4Mb on mine if I remember right) and cheekily add a IDE hard drive if you could deal with the ISA speed.

And it was simply a beautiful board.

I never used the SIMM slots as I didn't do much with SoundFonts at the time, but I did use the IDE controller for my CD drive.

It was like two and a half feet long. Sat in the bottom ISA slot so long that it eventually sagged far enough over the years to short itself out on the case.

 

[Shadowdancer]

I would not use anything from Creative. Their drivers always have sucked and always will. If you want something less noisy, go for a driverless USB interface.

 

[Zak Gordon]

Personally speaking i don't see (hear?) the point. Unless you are building a specific set up for music creation and want a professional aspect to your sound, why spend the money on something you probably won't notice and could put into better core hardware (GPU, SSD etc).

 

[Frank]

Disclaimer- I'm Scottish, value for money and getting as much wear as possible out of any purchase are national characteristics. My English friends call this 'being tight'? :S

I'm Scottish as well. The penny pinching option would be to use the built-in sound of the new motherboard and sell the soundcard.

 

[Shadowdancer]

Unless you are building a specific set up for music creation and want a professional aspect to your sound, why spend the money on something you probably won't notice

Depends on what you have. I've never had any onboard audio solution that didn't produce very audible buzz on line-out and nigh useless headphone output (microphone input not even worth mentioning).

 

[Morbad]

Depends on what you have. I've never had any onboard audio solution that didn't produce very audible buzz on line-out and nigh useless headphone output (microphone input not even worth mentioning).

Useless headphone output is understandable...most onboard solutions don't have much in the way of amplification as they are meant to drive powered speakers.

However, unless something is wrong with power/grounding, or you had a defective board, most any decent motherboard made in at least the last five years should produce clean sound on the rear outputs. Some boards do default to software/driver volume settings that are too high, but once these levels are calibrated correctly, I can turn my speakers up to deafening levels before I hear any hint of noise on essentially any of my boards.

 

[Shadowdancer]

However, unless something is wrong with power/grounding, or you had a defective board, most any decent motherboard made in at least the last five years should produce clean sound on the rear outputs.

All I can say is that mine never did, and I didn't buy from the bottom of the barrel either. Going through a cheap USB device is pretty much dead silent with everything at 11. So between that and no third-party drivers, it's the solution I like most

 

[Straha Yeagar]

Useless headphone output is understandable...most onboard solutions don't have much in the way of amplification as they are meant to drive powered speakers.

However, unless something is wrong with power/grounding, or you had a defective board, most any decent motherboard made in at least the last five years should produce clean sound on the rear outputs. Some boards do default to software/driver volume settings that are too high, but once these levels are calibrated correctly, I can turn my speakers up to deafening levels before I hear any hint of noise on essentially any of my boards.

Onboard amps to drive 600ohm headphones is becoming more common, even on mid range motherboards.

 

[Broon]

For - 1
Against - 6
Neutral - 2

And the Nay's have it!

I will leave the sound card out of the build with the reserve option to add it in at a later time should it become necessary.


Thanks for your opinions and insights Commanders! +Rep to all!