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The Creative Soundblaster X-Fi is the greatest advancment in audio for the personal computer ever. Well maybe thats a bit of an overstatement, but look at the Sound card market, what do you have? Theres Creative Soundblasters and Turtle Beach. The Audigy 2ZS has dominated for years, its great they finally come out with an improvment , because the Audigy 4 wasnt an improvment at all. And what happened to Audigy 3, lol.
And whats with the people with $1000 worth of video cards like dual 7800GTXs, and then there using onboard sound. That just pisses me off. Spend some money on the sound too. Sound can make or break a game. To me sound is very important, not just framerates, but good framerates and good sound.
The Creative Soundblaster X-Fi is the greatest advancment in audio for the personal computer ever. Well maybe thats a bit of an overstatement, but look at the Sound card market, what do you have? Theres Creative Soundblasters and Turtle Beach. The Audigy 2ZS has dominated for years, its great they finally come out with an improvment , because the Audigy 4 wasnt an improvment at all. And what happened to Audigy 3, lol.
And whats with the people with $1000 worth of video cards like dual 7800GTXs, and then there using onboard sound. That just pisses me off. Spend some money on the sound too. Sound can make or break a game. To me sound is very important, not just framerates, but good framerates and good sound.
I agree, though video is more importiant that sound in many areas. If you only have the money to buy either a video or a sound card for your system, I'd go with the video.
onboard sound isn't that bad now....and for most games i think it's fine....anothe reason ppl probably don't spend money on sound is because it probably SOUNDS fine to them..they don't know what they are missing...such as myself...my onboard ac codec sound is perfectly fine for me cuz i've never bought a sound card so i don't see the fuss about spending 100's of dollars on it, video on the other hand, you can SEE and TELL the difference when ur playing different games, you can tell if ur getting low frame rates or your graphics just plain suck...i think if creative wants to get there profits up...they need to show consumers WHY they NEED it...
And if you have an MSI nForce motherboard, there really is no need to upgrade to a sound card because it comes with Sound Blaster Live!, a unique feature which I don't believe any other motherboard manufacturer has.
Contributed by Predator, Guest 510 iVirtua Loyalty Points • • • Back to Top
I know I can hear a HUGE difference between most sound cards (assuming I have the same speakers). I have had 3 different comptuers setup on my portable (but awesome) speakers. My Celeron 850 w/ an Intel mobo sounds pretty good, the onboard on my PCChips Mobo is really 'Tin-y' and sounds un-natural, especially in games, and my Audigy 2 ZS is awesome, but is TOO clear on most MP3's, bringing out any distortion on MP3's at 192kbps or below.
nVidia has pretty dang good onboard sound. Not SB Live! quality, but good.
The biggest problem with onboard is slight peformance loss. In games with awesome audio, you can lose upto about 5-10% (If the game is CPU bound).
Some games, however, present about a 1-2% loss. Not noticable.
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