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Hi folks,
I'm considering building a new system around a Shuttle case and I'd like to carry over my Audigy 2 sound card from my current box as I'm sure the sound quality will be a lot better than the Shuttle's onboard chip. The question I have is; will I be able to wire the card up to the front panel audio sockets or are they going to become useless? I'm really hoping not as I frequently plug in headphones and don't want to be reaching round the back of the case every time I do so.
If its an nForce2 shuttle you won't notice much difference in sound quality.
You may be able to wire it up to the front sockets, on most shuttles they and the usb/firewire/spdif are all mounted to the same small piece of pcb which are then linked via a ribbon cable to the motherboard. You could de solder the audio sockets from the pcb and then connect them to you audigy but it wont be a pleasant task.
Ugh, that's a shame. It seems like there may be no easy solution for this problem. I can't believe the sound from an onboard chip is going to be as good as an EAX enabled sound card, especially in games. It's about time cases and cards started featuring standard connections for these sort of things in the way that most mobos now have spare USB headers that can be hooked up to front ports on the case.
nForce2 motherboards have a Soundstorm APU do some reading on it, its very good on par with Audigy's
Recent on /. is http://www.tweaktown.com/document.ph...Id=695&dPage=1
"nVidia SoundStorm APU the only sound solution capable of encoding Dolby Digital on the fly (which produces true and accurate 5.1 surround sound via either optical or digital coaxial cable to a set of computer speakers supporting these connections or to an external amplifier), it was also hardware accelerated meaning it does not chew up precise CPU cycles like other inferior onboard solutions which in turn reduces frames per second and do not have the ability to send separate digital signals to anymore than two channels. You’ll get 5.1 sound using three analog cables but this type of setup is nowhere near as impressive or realistic as what the SoundStorm produces."
And it tends to be quite a widely held view. Although Soundstorm is not on nForce3 or nForce4 solutions afaik.
Yeah, unfortunately I'm thinking of a SN85G4 v2 which is nForce3, I believe.