to be perfectly honest... realtek onboard audio is just as good as the best creative card. creative cards are more of a marketing gimmic then anything else. the only thing those cards really offer, is the game decoding technology (ex: EAX).
if you want a card that actually plays 2-channel music with real claritiy, get an audio editing card...
m-audio makes nice stuff
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16829121008'
again dont waste your money on creative, none of their cards are actually very good at all. they jam packed with tons of features, but have terrible ADACs (analog-digial-analog converts)
Let’s stick to the facts eh champ? This is the second time you have posted here with this bs.
ADAC - Myth 1 - Creative's are rubbish.For those who don't understand the (SNR) signal-to-noise ratio compares the level of a desired signal (such as music) to the level of background noise. The higher the ratio, the less obtrusive the background noise is. Thus the higher signal to noise ratio the better.
The realtek ALC888 ADAC has a SNR of around
97dB whereas the Creative Titanium (not the best btw), has a SNR of
109dB. Now remember dB is a logarithmic scale, so that is significantly better. Put it this way, 30dB is 100 times more than 20dB so you get the idea that 109 is much better than 97 (its actually less than that on its DAC).
Verdict: Now unless you want to record, which he doesn't, a
Creative is better - significantly.
Summary of the other aspects that are better on the Creative card (remember this is not the best one):
- Digital Dolby Support.
- X-Fi
- EAX
- 64mB or RAM onboard which allows sound samples to be processed onboard.
- PCIe x 1 card which means it leaves the PCI slot free
- DTS encoding...
Do I need to go on?
Unless you are recording in a home studio environment, nothing else is up to scratch, and it will definitely beat any onboard sound, even simply because of the interference from the motherboard is reduced....
Conclusion, will you notice the difference? YES! Provided you are not intending to record professional level recordings, you will notice a significant difference in noise reduction and sound quality with the Creative card over the onboard (any) sound solution.
btw Oregon is beautiful, spent most of this year there in the far NE.