lowndsie

I am currently using my inbuilt sound but I have an old sound blaster live card and I'm wondering if I'm really going to notice any difference if I installed that... I running logitec sub with 2 sats.

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ckfordy

Your running integrated sound right now right? Most of anything should be a improvement over integrated sound unless it is a really really old card.

Do you know what model soundblaster card it is and what is the model of your speakers. Then when you give us that information we can give a better answer as to if it will be better or not.

Raise109

Personaly i would go with the sb live. my last card was one of those. It was a lower end model, it would out perform my onboard in every way, especialy games. Dont get me wrong its not going to make a huge difference, but a little bit here and there can make all the difference. The sb's are outdated, fact, but still it is a dedicated card and will work to the most part on its own reasources and will only use system resources when being pushed, where as your onboard no matter how good a quality, will take ALL its resources from your system!
Remember to get the latest drivers for it though!
If you decide you dont like it you can always go back, no harm done!

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OvenMaster

Ah. I have onboard sound in the PC shown in my sig. I tried the Creative PCI 16 card from my old DEC because it sounded great, was more flexible and had the recorder and editing programs I really liked. Too bad it didn't play nice with my VIA chipset. Stuttering, clicking, dropouts galore, even with XP drivers. A real shame. I've since read that if you monkey with PCI slot latency, this problem can be solved, but my BIOS doesn't give me those options.
Tom

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The_Other_One

I had a Sound Blaster Live in my OLD old computer, and it was really nice. The quality was much higher than my current machines. I was actually quite disappointed with my previous Abit's soundcard. It was horrid! I kind of wish I'd kept that card

As for performace, I hear it's slightly better, but as others have mentioned, you won't see anything major. Look for reviews, I've seen posts of games being played with different cards, and with sound disabled. The difference would probably hardly be noticable.

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