What benefits does Audigy 2 7.1 have over onboard sound?

[sah]

Hi, i plan on getting an audigy 2 7.1 value and was wondering what advantages it has over onbaord sound in terms of sound quality in games and MP3s and framerates in games. Im using Sennheiser HD-570 headphones and i also use small harman-kardon speakers.

 

[TunaSoda]

Hi, i plan on getting an audigy 2 7.1 value and was wondering what advantages it has over onbaord sound in terms of sound quality in games and MP3s and framerates in games. Im using Sennheiser HD-570 headphones and i also use small harman-kardon speakers.

This is the exact card I just got for like $69 bucks and it made my framerates go from 32 to 71 in Half-Life 1 Multiplayer

It's better to have a soundcard than onboard so it does it's own processing

 

[sah]

what about in terms of quality?

 

[TunaSoda]

what about in terms of quality?

Well, it's basically the same card as the $129 gamer version, except that it has plastic jacks instead of gold jacks, no firewire, and it doesn't come with handfulls of games...

I only used it breifly for a game or two, but it's much better than my onboard was!
I used it with two stereo speakers last night, but tonight I am going to try it out with my 7.1 setup

We will see...

 

[sah]

Does anyone know how it will affect headphone users? Will high quality headphones sound differently on an Audigy compared to onboard sound.

 

[astrallite]

Yes, but if you are running high quality headphones the difference between those two wouldn't be as big as getting an external amp.

 

[bourgeoisdude]

Headphones? Probably not as "modern" onboard sound controllers do have decent headphone jacks. A separate soundcard benifits as it has separate processing (mentioned before) meaning more processor usage for other tasks. Usually the quality is better for sound cards as well. Please note that on most systems you will want to disable onboard sound in your BIOS BEFORE installing the sound card. XP *should* work even with both enabled, but trust me, save yourself the potential trouble and disable it in the bios.