morkys

How is the onboard sound quality vs for instance, a SB Live! OEM card, a regular SB Audigy 2 or perhaps nVidia Sound Storm? I used to have a SB PCI 128 and the sound quality seemed reasonable so I'm hoping the MSI's onboard audio will be equal or better. I won't be doing huge amounts of gaming, but I would like decent Analog to Digital for recording and playing around with audio and video recording. Digital to Analog for game playback I'm sure is ok. (Incidentally, I have found out that there is an nVidia driver upgrade for this nForce3 onboard sound on the MSI and it is supposed to improve things over the Realtek drivers so I will try that)

Just wondering how people find the sound quality of the onboard MSI Neo 2 plat, or for that matter, other motherboard owners with onboard sound Realtek ALC850 chips. I realize I can stick a PCI card in but it would be nice to use the onboard audio.

93glouden

lol i dunno about everyone else but i have used all difrent kinds of sound cards and on board sound and there is NO difrence



only thing is you can normally add more speakers to the sound cards

Echo_

i use the onboard sound on that mobo and its fine
dont think i could really tell a big difference

calvinius

i had sb live on old comp it was pretty good
i use the onboard sound on my new mobo its realtek and im pretty impressed with it

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Cromewell

yes I'm impressed with the realtek azailia driver on the i9x5 chipsets. it's quite good for onboard, up there with nvidia's soundstorm

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4W4K3

u really need good/great speakers to notice any difference. an audigy4 vs. onboard soundblaster 16bit will be hard to tell with 2 $10 speakers. i use a cheaper Hercules Muse 5.1DVD gamesurround sound sound card and am very happy. never used onboard b4.

http://www.tweaknews.net/reviews/muse/
~2 years ago it was expensive to me...now it might be only like $30 i dunno.

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morkys

Depends what your onboard sound is. The nVidia nForce2 Sound Storm chipset is very good compared to others, so thats an exception. The Realtek ALC850 is supposed to be less impressive. I'm not so concerned with games as I am with what would happen if I used the DAC's or ADC's on there to do some encoding etc while recording audio or something.

double-dragon

I am using the onboard sound off my A7 through a set of headphones and its great.
Getting 5.1 surround soon though.

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morkys

You guys may have sound storm, which is really good.

[-0MEGA-]

The sound cards are always better then integrated sound. If you have speakers under $30, dont upgrade, if you have niec speakers and want nice sound, go with the audigy 2 or audigy 2 ZS (I have a sound blaster live! with my logitech 280Watt 5.1 speakers) Sounds much better then integrated. And if you have any speakers that are over 2.0channels, you will most likely need a new card to support the new speakers , ex. a 5.1 speaker system uses 3 wires instead of just 1. Hope that helped.

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