On board sound cards

Not a problem as such I am just after some information. I know in general that on-board sound cards are nothing special but just the other day a friend said to me that they cause slow down on games etc. Can someone please tell me if this is true?


Thanks
Andy

 

as any onboard device it does take away from cpu cycles enough to make a difference i do not know but the sound quality from some sound cards is much better than onboard sound. I was interested in the difference so I bought an soundblaster card and was impressed in the difference it depends on what kind of onboard sound you have. List the model of your motherboard so we can tell what kind you have.

 

it depends on how the sound board is set up .. the only way it would slow a game down is if it used up CPU time that could've been spent rendering, etc .. but a descent one shouldn't .. in fact i've heard that an add on sound card is worse for gaming because it gives the CPU added tasks, but from my experience that isn't true .. I didn't notice much of an improvement(certainly didn't notice any degraded performance) when I went from onboard to a sound card as far as gaming is concerned, except for added features such as EAX but that has nothing to do with graphics performance

 

Thanks for advice my systems getting on abit old now I have plans to do a new build when I have the money I will probably just get a sound card when I do that.

I am currently using a MSI KT4AV
The sound displays as Realtek AC'97 Audio for VIA (R) Audio Controller

I sometimes build PC's for family and friends in the past a have not looked into the on board sound being a problem but most people I help out are low end pc users and just use there PC's for internet, MS Word etc. Do you think I should buy sound cards for these PC's in the future?

Thanks again..

 

not unless they're audiophiles. The computer in my sig is my gaming rig but the specs of this machine are much lower(having onboard graphics w/ 4MB RAM lol, and onboard sound) and I don't notice any difference in internet speed, as word processors and browsers don't take much effort on the part of the hardware .. their money is much better spent elsewhere(bigger HDD, more RAM, faster CPU)

 

Yeah unless they have a good speaker set up and like playing alot of music, without a good speaker system the card pretty much goes to waste.