pupdawg21 Posted August 2, 2010 Share Posted August 2, 2010 In some instances there may be a small difference in CPU load. However, with that said the main benefit of dedicated sound cards as opposed to onboard is the improved sound quality. If you have a decent set of speakers paired with a decent dedicated sound card the quality in sound should be significant on almost everything. Some dedicated cards however seem to suffer from various driver issues where you may run into some issues when playing DVD/blu ray audio and some in-game audio where as with on board audio these issues are for the most part mute since developers target onboard chips since that is what most of their customers will be using. So, overall Dedicated sound card is better but it may come with a few occassional hiccups and issues along with the improved audio quality. If your primary goal is to shave off a few CPU cycles then you should just stick with on board and not really waste the money on a dedicated card. If however you are looking to get improved sound quality and positional audio then dedicated is definitely the way to go. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
goretsky Supervisor Posted August 3, 2010 Supervisor Share Posted August 3, 2010 Hello, From looking at this description of the sound card on Wikipedia, it appears that EAX 3.0/4.0 support is done in software (i.e., on the host CPU), not in the sound card's hardware. If you take a look at the main article for SoundBlaster cards here, you will see a list of DSPs towards the bottom of the article. Try to find a card with one of these on board that works within your system requirements and budget; I suspect a used one from a computer surplus store or eBay would be a good choice. Regards, Aryeh Goretsky Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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