Realtek ALC850 on-board, versus Creative SB Live PCI

[BlueMagician]

Do people think gaming performance and framerates would take a hit if I ditched my SBL PCI card and moved to using the onboard 'Karajan Audio' (Realtek 850) on my DFI-SLI-DR?

The Realtek chipset supports DirectSound and EAX1/2 (and I think 5.1 through optical), so is there any other reason for me to be using my only free PCI slot in on my system, and not giving these 6800GT's more room to breath?

I know with cheapo onboard audios, the processing is taken over by the CPU, but to be perfectly honest, I'm not sure how much work my current Creative card does or passes to the CPU anyway...


Advice would be much appreciated,
S.

[Firelord]

Doubt that much tbh.

The SB Live is quite an old card in fact I think the onboard prob has a smaller overhead than the SB Live!

[Steve]

Well I ditched my Live for the Realtek codec on my A8N SLI - the nVidia drivers work best but cause a problem in VLC, so I'm on the ASUS packaged Realtek drivers for now, which don't support surround sound too well.

[Ravens Nest]

I couldnt find any benchmarks on the soundblaster live vs ALC850
But this benchmark shows the CPU overhead for Soundblaster live! (24bit) against the ALC850 and tho CPU utilisation is lower with the live! it isnt by very much. (And you've got to remember this is basically the audigy 2, not the old live!)

Take a look for yourself it's at the bottom of the page
http://www.anandtech.com/printarticle.aspx?i=2358

My brother had the old Soundblaster Live! Value and the difference in sound quality between the live! and his new K8N nforce 3 ultra motherboard with ALC850 codec is staggering. (The ALC850 is much better )

Hope this helps

[BlueMagician]

Thanks for everyones comments - it looks like a viable solution to ditch the SBLPCI then, but for one thing... I'm also gonna lose the GamePort - which means without some sort of USB<>GAMEPORT adaptor (if such a thing exists), I'm not gonna be able to use my MS FF Wheel or Joystick..

lol, S.

[Firelord]

Check at maplins as I believe they do one I know microsoft did for their pro joystick

[BlueMagician]

Check at maplins as I believe they do one I know microsoft did for their pro joystick

Thanks for the trail, geezer, unfortunatley after a little more reading it seems that the Maplin adaptors (indeed any that I could find anywhere) either:


> Do not allow the controller model to be correctly identified by XP, only as a generic MS Joypad, or
> Do not parse Force Feedback information for some reason.


Some article I breezed over said it was because the forcefeedback controllers used the extra pins of the gameport, not available with USB, to carry FF data - but you're right - I'm sure MS released a USB FF Wheel a couple years after mine, so they must have made it work somehow..


Hmmm.. S.

[tfboy]

I'm quite interested in people's views, particularly in light of the MSI K8N which has SB Live 24 codec on board. Is this noticably better than the 850 variety? I quite like my sound and after having a play with an Asus A8N SLI, I was truly dissapointed with the "noise" induced by the hardware such as mouse moving on the screen, cd drive access, etc.

[oralpain]

The original live! and live! 5.1 have pritty poor cpu utilization, in most cases the ALC850 will be better. I've tested both.

Sound quality on the live also won't be much better, unless you are useing KX drivers or drivers that allow you to swap the front and rear out puts so you can use the better DAC.