Gigabye Motherboard good souce?

I'm really dumb, what's the question?

If your upgrading your system anyway it won't cost you anything to try it and see if you like it. The general consensus here is that on board audio sucks. 

this is actually my mobo in my current computer, onboard isn't as bad as people on headfi believe, i cant tell the difference between my ipodclassic/ibasso t3d and the realtek 889

try it for yourself

Well in your shoes if my PC is the source and i am thinking of demanding cans in the future i would either go

a. Fiio E10 if budget is sub $100 or

b. PCI/PCIe sound card (if u really want EAX, etc) + Fiio E9 desktop headphone amplifier

Quote:

Originally Posted by trog 
Well in your shoes if my PC is the source and i am thinking of demanding cans in the future i would either go

a. Fiio E10 if budget is sub $100 or

b. PCI/PCIe sound card (if u really want EAX, etc) + Fiio E9 desktop headphone amplifier

With a sound card with a good built in headphone amplifier, you will not need an external headphone amplifier.

You can also get a single tube headphone amplifier for $55, off eBay, ships from China, takes ten days.

and plug it into the built in sound card.
 

Ya was thinking in the case of hard to drive 600ohms cans

The onboard is probably clean enough for driving low impedance phones and doing non-critical listening like gaming and multimedia duty.  Something off-board will get you the best music performance.  If you are spending a few hundred dollars max for a good sound solution, you might as well pick up a good all in one unit that runs off the USB or something.  So you can easily move it from build to build and place to place.  Quite a few decent choices in the low hundreds range.

Oh, and if you take a look at that board (and any board now a days, except very few), they actually use all solid capacitors, even for the coupling in the audio section!!  And if you look at the value of those capacitors, it is clear that they can't drive really low impedance phones unless the output impedance is really high (which is in itself stupid).  Its all about marketing.  Gigabyte gives you proper coupling capacitors in the highest of the highest models of their motherboards, and they even advertise this difference.

I thought, or the markenting make me to, solid caps were even superior to the  eletrolytc japanese ones.  I´ve seen them in many top end sound-cards.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Handy Ray 

Oh, and if you take a look at that board (and any board now a days, except very few), they actually use all solid capacitors, even for the coupling in the audio section!!  And if you look at the value of those capacitors, it is clear that they can't drive really low impedance phones unless the output impedance is really high (which is in itself stupid).  Its all about marketing.  Gigabyte gives you proper coupling capacitors in the highest of the highest models of their motherboards, and they even advertise this difference.

have you even listened off a gigabyte motherboard and carefully compared it to another "superior" source? especially the gigabyte ud3 990fx which is a rather high end motherboard 

Quote:

Originally Posted by Handy Ray 

Oh, and if you take a look at that board (and any board now a days, except very few), they actually use all solid capacitors, even for the coupling in the audio section!!  And if you look at the value of those capacitors, it is clear that they can't drive really low impedance phones unless the output impedance is really high (which is in itself stupid).  Its all about marketing.  Gigabyte gives you proper coupling capacitors in the highest of the highest models of their motherboards, and they even advertise this difference.

This seems true, I noticed some higher end gigabyte boards like this, to have different capacitors in the audio section. Nice touch by Gigabyte, don't know if other brands are doing the same. Usually expensive motherboards are all about the graphics and cpu benchmarks.
 

Quote:

Originally Posted by nagual 

I thought, or the markenting make me to, solid caps were even superior to the  eletrolytc japanese ones.  I´ve seen them in many top end sound-cards.

Solid capacitors, even though can last forever are not the best for audio application. (Still my Auzentech Prelude is doing fine)

Quote:

Originally Posted by sonci 

 

Solid capacitors, even though can last forever are not the best for audio application. (Still my Auzentech Prelude is doing fine)

 

Do you know why ?