Should I change?

[Access]

I have a mb Gigabyte 8PE 667 Ultra, it have sound card on board and raid on board using promise chipset.
Question:
1. should I change the on board sound card to pci sound card, does it increase performance? but I use it only for digital out
2. should I change the on board raid into pci raid? what is the difference?

Complete Spec:
mobo Gigabyte 8PE667 Ultra
PIV 1.8 A
Corsair XMS 2700 256 MB
Maxtor 40 G 7200 RPM (x2)
GF2 GTS Pro 64 MB DDR

Life just like a maze

 

[jihiggs]

onboard stuff is on the pci bus, same as a pci card. there is no difference in bandwidth, or priority.

my computer is so fast, it completes an endless loop in less than 4 seconds!

 

[tombance]

There could be a difference in CPU utilisation. Most onboard sound 'systems' make use of the system processor to do their calculations. PCI cards rarely do this and instead have there own processor, such as the Audigy2. This is exception on the nForce2 soundstorm motherboards where the processing is carried out by the southbridge which contains the nvidia APU.

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[slvr_phoenix]

And just as importantly, the actual sound quality is often better with a quality PCI card than with an onboard solution because most onboard solutions use the cheapest parts possible. (The most notable exception again being the nForce2.) But if you're not an audiophile, this may be of little importance.

Likewise, a quality RAID card might have more options or just simply run better than an onboard RAID for the same reason.

But it likely would only make a difference if you were to go with an expensive high-quality card to replace the onboard stuffus. If you go with a cheap card to replace the onboard stuffus, then you could very well end up with the same corner-cutting crap quality of parts. 😉


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[FUGGER]

GF2 GTS upgrade will get you more performance increase with your current setup.

Leave the sound and raid alone.

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[Access]

thank you for your kind answer, but I have another question regarding this issue

I have a PCI sound card Sound Blaster Live! 5.1 DE, if I change to this card is it make any difference in quality and speed? how much is the difference?

about the raid.. perhaps I should stay on this one, perhaps I upgrade the graphics card, I intend to get ATI Radeon 9700 Pro, and perhaps memory upgrade to 512

the reason I'm asking this kind of question is because when I play Morrowind, after quite sometime, the game become slow, after I look at my computer, it seems the game keep accessing the hard drive, maybe swap file, it doesn't matter when I OC to 2.52 or 2.8, now I set to 2.4 which is 133 bus speed..

thank you again in advance

Life just like a maze

 

[slvr_phoenix]

I have a PCI sound card Sound Blaster Live! 5.1 DE, if I change to this card is it make any difference in quality and speed? how much is the difference?

The speed difference won't really be very much. (Unless you're using 3D sound in which case it might make a noticable improvement.) Sound quality will almost definately see an improvement, but depending on your speakers and ears you may not really notice it.

about the raid.. perhaps I should stay on this one, perhaps I upgrade the graphics card, I intend to get ATI Radeon 9700 Pro, and perhaps memory upgrade to 512

Upgrading the memory will improve a lot of things. Upgrading the graphics card will improve just about any game. Upgrading the RAID will at best be a minor improvement in load and save times.

the reason I'm asking this kind of question is because when I play Morrowind, after quite sometime, the game become slow, after I look at my computer, it seems the game keep accessing the hard drive, maybe swap file, it doesn't matter when I OC to 2.52 or 2.8, now I set to 2.4 which is 133 bus speed..

It sounds to me like you are running out of RAM when playing Morrowind and so Windows starts to use virtual memory. I'd bet that if you just upgraded the RAM to 512MB (or higher) it wouldn't chunk like that anymore.

Of course, if I remember correctly the company that wrote Morrowind is the same group of monkeys that slapped together Daggerfall. If so, it's entirely possible that Morrowind is just so full of software bugs and memory leaks that upgrading your memory will only buy you more time before it gets sluggish again and not actually fix the problem. I could be wrong on that though. Maybe those hacks finally learned to code. Maybe. Have you ever suddenly fallen through a perfectly normal floor in Morrowind for no good reason only to be lost in a nonexistant region?


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