Sound Card and Wifi Card in PCI-E 1x or Standard PCI(32bit legacy) Slot

[adam38654]

I am upgrading my 4 year old Dell Inspiron 519 a little bit and was wondering what slots are best suited for a sound card, and a wifi card. After I install a video card into the pci-e 16x 2.0 slot, that I assume will take up two slots, I will only have one pci-e 1x(the short one) and one stand old school pci slot.

Secondly is a sound card even necessary when I only use the factory Dell 2 speaker setup or a set of headphones and does it take an appreciable amount of load of the CPU compared to using the on-board audio?

Spec.

Dell Inspiron 519
530watt Power Supply
AMD Athlon X2 2.9ghz 5600+
8GB PC2-6400 RAM
Video Card- Undecided
Vista Home Premium 64-bit(Soon to be Windows 7)

 

[noidea_77]

Don't wast you money on a sound card. That only makes sense combined with an av receiver for multimedia or a very good headphone. For the wifi I recommend an usb stick, because it' way more flexible with the antenna positioning (back or front usb).

 

[adam38654]

Well I already have an old Sound blaster Live PCI card and may get a 4 speaker setup with bass box one day or atleast some good headphones but I see what your saying.

I like the little wifi USB sticks but are they really fast enough for online gaming without lag. I always hard wired my PC's on my lan because WIFI was so slow and didn't go very far until the last few years it has gotten pretty good.

I am just worried about lag because I am used to having Comcast/Roadrunner fiber optic with my cable modem(very fast) ran directly to my 10/100 lan card for the past 15 years. Now I will be on satellite internet and by the time the signal goes from my pc's wifi card,to the wifi router,to the receiver, then to the satellite,and then back down to where every it needs to go I will have a higher ping.

 

[noidea_77]

Well I already have an old Sound blaster Live PCI card and may get a 4 speaker setup with bass box one day or atleast some good headphones but I see what your saying.

I like the little wifi USB sticks but are they really fast enough for online gaming without lag. I always hard wired my PC's on my lan because WIFI was so slow and didn't go very far until the last few years it has gotten pretty good.

I am just worried about lag because I am used to having Comcast/Roadrunner fiber optic with my cable modem(very fast) ran directly to my 10/100 lan card for the past 15 years. Now I will be on satellite internet and by the time the signal goes from my pc's wifi card,to the wifi router,to the receiver, then to the satellite,and then back down to where every it needs to go I will have a higher ping.

I see your point, but there is no real difference between a wifi stick and a card. The latency / ping will be the same and never as good as it is with a wired connection.
If you go for a 5.1 speaker system, think about one with optical / usb / hdmi connection, that has it's own Dolby decoder.