Built-in (ALC892) sound or Creative SB X-Fi

[alhowarth]

I'm building a new PC with a ASRock Z68 Extreme4 motherboard. It has Realtek ALC892 - 8 Channels. I am using an Creative SB X-Fi card (PCI) in my old PC.

The question is, should I move the SB card to my new PC, or use the built-in sound on my new Motherboard??


Thanks,
Al

 

[kajabla]

If you didn't already have a card, I'd tell you not to bother buying one, but there's no reason not to use your existing one.

 

[gamerk316]

Which X-fi? Makes a huge difference.

In terms of actual "quality" of the analog output, the onboard beats every Creative soundcard except the Titanium line. that being said, Creative does a lot of work driver level to clean up the signal, and the advanced features in the driver suite [EQ, Crystalizer, Dolby/DTS/THX] can't be done with onboard audio.

 

[palladin9479]

Depends on your own feelings. I had a Creative Xi-Fi PCI sound card and the drivers were hell on the system. Eventually just uninstalled it and removed the card, using the onboard Via SoundMax audio and its working like a champ. More stable and less crapping out.

Creative used to make wonderful products but lately their drivers and forced "helper" programs have gotten so out of hand that I can't stand them. That and there is a known memory leak that they won't fix, every time something hooks one of those "helper" programs it cause's a small amount of memory to be allocated. The program never deallocates the memory and next call just allocates more. Each call is something like 1~2KB of memory, minor but depending on how many "enhancements" you have that could quickly get to be 400MB+. Onetime I found that it had allocated 2GB+ of memory after it was running for a week.

 

[alhowarth]

Thanks for the replies! I decided to leave the card out and go with on-board.

 

[alhowarth]

Best answer selected by alhowarth.