Onboard Audio vs dedicated sound card

[gepeto]

Thanks for all the help. One more Question. I have a bunch of old games from the 90's through early 2000. Like star trek the fallen ,Bridge commander to the swat games. Can these run on Widows 7 is it a hassle or is it easier just to make a low end win 98\2000 system?

If I recall the big thing back then was gl. Games like King Pin and AvP.

[sheath]

I have only poked around online about this a few times. I have a Soundblaster Awe 64, Awe 64 Value, a Sound Blaster 16, and my typical Realtek onboard audio with my Asus motherboard. I've tried each for my HTPC with my Dolby Prologic Tuner. With only a single headphone to RCA cable they all sounded identical, so I use the onboard sound to free up a PCI slot.

What I have been wondering is whether there would be a way to hook up my HTPC to take advantage of the 5.1 sound output that I would have if I had a PC sound system instead. I don't have an optical input on my tuner, so I am guessing the answer is no.

[Gamevet]

You can use a digital coaxial connection Sheath. Even my old Pro-logic receiver had that.

Another option is running it through the HDMI port of your video card.

[sheath]

My tuner is from 1992, it doesn't have HDMI, but there is a coax input I have never tried using. I'm not even sure how I would go about hooking that up to my PC sound. Any help would be appreciated.

-edit-

Nevermind, there isn't even a coax input for it. It does look like I have RCA inputs for the "Video" input that has all of the inputs. I'll have to look into some more headphone to RCA cables and see if that works!

-edit-edit-

Nevermind again, even if I get all of the "SPDIF" Outs hooked up to the appropriate inputs on my Pro Logic Tuner everything online says I will hear less on the satellite speakers than I do now with stereo output from the HTPC. That is a bummer.

[Gamevet]

I have only poked around online about this a few times. I have a Soundblaster Awe 64, Awe 64 Value, a Sound Blaster 16, and my typical Realtek onboard audio with my Asus motherboard. I've tried each for my HTPC with my Dolby Prologic Tuner. With only a single headphone to RCA cable they all sounded identical, so I use the onboard sound to free up a PCI slot.

What I have been wondering is whether there would be a way to hook up my HTPC to take advantage of the 5.1 sound output that I would have if I had a PC sound system instead. I don't have an optical input on my tuner, so I am guessing the answer is no.

I did a little experiment tonight. I decided to hook up my gaming PC to the 24" LG monitor on my desktop, using the HDMI port and outputting the sound from the monitor to my 2.1 surround stereo. The sound was actually a little cleaner, and I could hear instruments that weren't quite as crisp using the analog output of the onboard sound. I'd also noticed that my benchmarks on Heaven improved by about 500 frames. I decided to check out my CPU usage, and it substantially dropped while using the digital sound output vs. the onboard sound. You might want to try that out, if your monitor has an HDMI port.

[sheath]

I did a little experiment tonight. I decided to hook up my gaming PC to the 24" LG monitor on my desktop, using the HDMI port and outputting the sound from the monitor to my 2.1 surround stereo. The sound was actually a little cleaner, and I could hear instruments that weren't quite as crisp using the analog output of the onboard sound. I'd also noticed that my benchmarks on Heaven improved by about 500 frames. I decided to check out my CPU usage, and it substantially dropped while using the digital sound output vs. the onboard sound. You might want to try that out, if your monitor has an HDMI port.

Unfortunately, when I built this HTPC I did not have anything with HDMI, so I made sure the Video card had Component, VGA and DVI out. I'm seriously wondering what would happen if I took five headphone to RCA cables and hooked up every output on my sound card to my tuner's five input "Video" mode. I guess I'll head over to monoprice at some point and get all the cables I need to see if that helps.

That is interesting that the HDMI out on the video card takes a strain off the CPU usage, I wouldn't think that onboard audio would use the CPU. I wonder if a dedicated sound card saves CPU time.

[kedawa]

Both onboard and dedicated audio consume CPU cycles when running Windows7/Vista because of how the audio driver works, but an actual sound card will generally use less.
I imagine the same is true for the audio chipset integrated into the video card, but I have no firsthand experience with such cards.