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Do Soundcards really make a difference?
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Posted by: SKYHN
I have a pentium 4 1.3ghz running win me, 256 RDRam, and Nvidia TNT2 Pro/64 32mb. My sound card is a piece of crap in my opinion. It is a Sound Blaster 128 Pci.
A lot of times when im playing a game or just listening to music or watching videos, the sound skips like im shaking a cd player that has no anti-skip. Now if I reboot and dont open anything but the music i wanna listen to, its fine, but sometimes the startup sound skips out, as do all the others ones. Finnaly, about 10 mins ago, I got sick of this happening.
So now I've got my eyes on a Soundblaster Xgamer, Not the audigy, I dont really need all that power, I just want something that will work well for games and what not. I also wanna spend about $80 to $90 on it. I am still building my dream machine in january/february of next year, I just want something to hold me over til then.
Will a better sound card make that big of a difference?
Posted by: SKYHN
Oh, i forgot to mention, I am assuming that it is my sound card. That is one of the cheapest soundcards that soundblaster makes.
Posted by: Jess
 Quote:
Originally posted by SKYHN
Oh, i forgot to mention, I am assuming that it is my sound card. That is one of the cheapest soundcards that soundblaster makes.
- Actually, the SB pci 128-bit card isn't the cheapest (Or near it).
Aswell, I have it and it works great for anything I do:-\
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Posted by: Darky!
SB PC128 is one of the cheapest SB cards creative still makes (I tihnk? (Unless they still prosuce SB 16/32's)
A better sound card does make a difference, even with poor quality speakers, you should get a noticeable inprovemant in sound quality. If you have good speakers, you should get a very noticiable change in sound quality.
Posted by: Outlaw
I know someone who used an SB128 pci for a long time (until the rear speaker part stopped working) and he never had problems with skipping sound so I don't think the SB is the problem.
Do you have other programs that get loaded with windows, like a virusscanner? And did you turn off the onboard soundblaster on your motherboard (if you have one)?
Posted by: SKYHN
I do have a virus scanner but I turn it off once I have found that an .mp3 or any other file that I download does not have a virus. About 2 months ago I got a virus off Kazaa that's remedy was format c: because every .exe on my hard drive was infected. It turned out to be a really old trojan virus and mcafee said i wasnt at that high of a risk, because no one used that virus anymore. Anyways, I'll still replace my soundcard anyways, sometimes in games, when theres too much sound, it cant handle it.
Posted by: Digitalphatman
I thionk that the quality is being affected due to the HD and Controller not being able to supply enouhg info to the sound card.
THis happens to me when
A. I have very low system resources(i.e windows has some how magically made my respources close to zero)
B. Or when i have music or something playing and i try to start another application like GTA2 of Starcraft. During those periods of making my poor HD load apps and play music at the same time it tends to stutter and go all crazy. THis also happens to me on my moms computer which has a slow HD(its like pre ata 33) and just sucks at trying to stream data or anything like that.
Posted by: Digitalphatman
wow nm that last post was um just pointless and stupid and should be banished to a life of imprisonment and torture. i f----ed that up good.
Posted by: SKYHN
I doubt it had anything to do with my hard drive. I may not have RAID but Ultra Ata 100 works just fine for me. I might have to post about something on my hard drive though, cuz I dont understand what a certain thing means.
Posted by: Kdr Kane
I'd be interested in what operating system you are using.
It may be a paging file problem. Are you using default settings and what are the settings?
Posted by: SKYHN
Im using Windows Me.
As for paging file, what is that?
(some stuff in windows is foreign to me)
Posted by: Digitalphatman
The paging file is where windows keeps its virtual memory. Its that little place where windows uses the hard drive as memory when it does not have enough RAM.
Posted by: Ion Silverbolt
Buy an Audigy! Same price as a SB Live if you look around. Not only do they sound better, it has a built-in Firewire port on the card. Which may well come in handy later if you want an external hard drive for backup or want to use it for high speed networking.
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