onboard audio/LAN or PCI cards?

T

theodork

Weaksauce
Joined
Jun 15, 2004
Messages
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I just got an shuttle an35 ultra (finally O/Ced by 2500+, 11*200fsb 1.65v, stock cooling), the board has the Realtek ALC650 5.1 Channel Codec and Realtek 8201BL 10/100M.

Would it be better to use my old soundblaster live! value 4.1 or the onboard sound in terms of performance impact, i only have 4.1 speakers. Same with the ethernet, should i use the onboard stuff or my linksys LNE 100tx.

i know the onboard stuff works well enough, just wondering if i should use my pci cards since i already have them..
 
a35 ?

do you mean the AN53N ? ?

If so then i would use the onboard over a sblive any day of the week
 
well i did a little googling and im still not sure

onboard LAN may actually be better since it may use less PCI bandwidth... at the very least it wont be any worse than a PCI card

onboard audio.... it may be better for the same reasons as onboard LAN, but some high end PCI sound cards may be better because they'll do more onboard processing and have higher sound quality
 
The onboard sound and the SB card would probably sound about the same if you use the analog sound ports on the motherboard, now if you used the SPDIF ports then the onboard sound would probably sound noticebly better but bear in mind that the Realtek chip offloads most of the work on to the CPU, as does the onboard LAN chip. Together both of those chips can really eat up alot of CPU processing time so if I were you I'd stick with the SB Live.
 
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