View Single Post - What's the difference between sound cards for audio and for games?

PunterCam · 01-31-2008, 01:31 PM

I made perfect sense!

Basically no matter how the card is advertised, and no matter what the price ($30 - $150) it will sound rubbish if it's outputing through a minijack. These cards aren't physically big enough to have good DAC's, so buy any of them, they will all sound 'fine'.

If you want to listen to an uncoloured sound as it sounds sitting on your hard drive, then you have to take the digital out and convert it elsewhere.

I'd be surprised if there was one physical difference between the gamer and music card.

01-31-2008, 01:31 PM	#12 (permalink)
PunterCam Gold Member Join Date: Jan 2008 Posts: 423	I made perfect sense! Basically no matter how the card is advertised, and no matter what the price ($30 - $150) it will sound rubbish if it's outputing through a minijack. These cards aren't physically big enough to have good DAC's, so buy any of them, they will all sound 'fine'. If you want to listen to an uncoloured sound as it sounds sitting on your hard drive, then you have to take the digital out and convert it elsewhere. I'd be surprised if there was one physical difference between the gamer and music card. __________________ 2006 Mac Pro Dual, dual core xeons @ 2.0Ghz each 2Gb Ram (I'm too poor) NVidia Geforce 7300Gt 256mb Onboard Sound - optical out to Logitech Z5500 Digidesign MBox2 output to PMCs 250Gb Drive running both Mac OSX and Windows on seperate partitions, 400Gb Seagate Drive for Windows, 400Gb WD Drive for OSX 24¨ Acer AL2416W (not nearly as bad as you'd think) Various Lacie external drives