Asus Z97 sabertooth mark 1 onboard sound

[acg515]

How is the sound on this motherboard?

I know in the past, around 04 when I was building computers, you needed a sound card or games wouldn't run. Is it still like that or can I get away without a sound card.

 

[i7Baby]

The sound in most mobos now is a hell of a lot better than in 2004. As you can see from the audio specs - http://www.asus.com/Motherboards/SABERTOOTH_Z97_MARK_1/specifications/

Not many people now get sound cards for them.

 

[Gunmetal_61]

Nowadays, you practically don't need expansion cards. Sound cards are reserved for professionals, rich people, and audiophiles; all of which have really expensive/good equipment that can actually transmit the difference (except for the last group, they may have it for no reason). Motherboards come with so many ports and features these days. You don't need to add USB. FireWire is useless. They still make boards with VGA for some reason. The only expansion card that you might need is a wireless card, but even some motherboards come with built-in Wi-Fi these days.

Essentially, if you have average speakers or are just planning to play songs through your $50 Sony headphones, it won't matter. Onboard audio is more than enough for you. It also depends on the quality of the audio files you're playing.

And no, I don't count a graphics card as an expansion card. For gamers, it's practically part of the motherboard. In our eyes, integrated graphics don't exist.

 

[acg515]

Thanks for the feedback guys. Computers have come a hell of a long ways since the 2000's, that's for sure.

The ssd's are especially impressive to me, they aren't even as big as a deck of cards or a pack of cigarettes.

The gpus are something I have never really thought of as an 'expansion' card. As far as gaming goes, a good card is absolutely essential and I didn't imagine that would change.

The features now are mind boggling. Trying to wrap my head around it all took me a week or two of just researching. I've been out of computer building for a while so it's a lot of fun getting back into it.

 

[Gunmetal_61]

Thanks for the feedback guys. Computers have come a hell of a long ways since the 2000's, that's for sure.

The ssd's are especially impressive to me, they aren't even as big as a deck of cards or a pack of cigarettes.

The gpus are something I have never really thought of as an 'expansion' card. As far as gaming goes, a good card is absolutely essential and I didn't imagine that would change.

The features now are mind boggling. Trying to wrap my head around it all took me a week or two of just researching. I've been out of computer building for a while so it's a lot of fun getting back into it.

Oh absolutely. I'm still in high school and starting my sophomore year, but I have a lot of interest in this stuff. I got a lot of my knowledge of the old from my dad who doesn't like to throw away anything. He still has 20 year-old CRT monitors, a lot of old sound and video cards, and Apple IIe, 386 systems, etc. There's an old motherboard with a snap-in Pentium 3 card module on the table next to me (many motherboards back then didn't have on-board CPU sockets) and a box of individual RAM chips you had to plug in one at a time into a ton of sockets on the board. It just comes to show that a lot of my peers take for granted the speed, compactness, and convenience of all the hardware we have today.

I built my first custom system last year, has an i5, RAID 1 paired hard drives, an SSD... Salvaged three used monitors for free and plugged them in. Has everything, except for the video card. He hasn't let me get one yet. Unfortunately for me, he doesn't see me as having much self-control when it comes to video games. Something I'll have to work on. (But Intel's latest HD 4600 integrated graphics on my Haswell are surprisingly good for integrated. I was able to play select games that were only a few years old quite well at 720p. Borderlands 2 (2012) was playable at about 25 FPS. With HD 5000 and 5100 found on laptops, it should be even better. I can cope for now.)

Anyways, have fun with your build!