A friend of mine moved to Ottawa and I've been told by him and another local friend that I need to build a new computer so that we can play Half Life 2 together when it comes out

I dont need any help with building it as I am in IT and built my current computer.

One thing I am wondering about is the sound reproduction aspect...

I was thinking that I may just use whatever onboard sound card is on the motherboard and output it via coax spdif to my art dio and from there into my headphone amp.

Is there any reason for me to get a sound card for music? And for games to I need an audigy?

FYI, the motherboard that I am looking at is the Abit KV8 [unless the AV8 and FX proc's come down in price by the time I build]... and possibly the Fatal1ty board that they are hyping if it looks like it is worth it.

I will be trying to get a fairly silent cooling solution, but have no idea where to start with PSU's... I'd like a fair amount of power as I am likely going with a 6800GT [maybe the galaxy glacier or the BFG]... but would like it to run as silent as possible.

Any suggestions are welcome.

You don't need Audigy for games.. onboard sound is probably good enough for that.

As for music, either Chaintech AV-710 ($24) or mucho better E-mu 0404 ($100) would be really good choices.

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Perhaps on a quality scale. But in terms of game performance, most of the onboard sound actually eats up a lot of CPU processing power just to use any 3D audio positioning at all whatsoever. In the worst cases, onboard audio on a 3.4 GHz P4 and a X800XT-PE would make your games run as slow as a typical 2.4GHz Celeron-based system with a 9600XT card.

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I call ********s on this one.

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Agreed

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I was talking about older onboard solutions when I made that post. I have not had any experience with onboard audio at all whatsoever since the early Pentium III days - I have always used a separate PCI soundcard, and turned off all onboard audio.

By the way, maybe performance has improved since the last time I tried onboard. But some onboard solutions still have problems with sound either cutting out or becoming stuttery or choppy in games. That is a driver issue - and even so, some companies refused to update their drivers. (But then again, the Sound Blaster series have had some audio issues with some of the newest games such as Doom 3.)

And yes, I did exaggerate the performance loss with onboard sound (the currently in use ones such as the Analog Devices SoundMAX). Realistically, the performance hit would be the equivalent of bringing down a 3.4GHz P4/GF6800U combo to about the level of a 3.0 to 3.2 GHz P4 with a GF6800GT card. That's hardly worth complaining about, in this case.

Onboard sound solutions nowadays actually don't use much CPU power these days. Any good nforce2 boards would perform just fine. And I would hope that the newer ones are just as par if not any better.

Soundstorm is probably the best onboard, others vary.

Back in P3 days onboard vs. decent PCI soundcard did matter much more simply because of the low CPU power compared to what's available today (and of course the software has evolved too). So a 20% hit with a 800MHz P3 could be down to 3-5% on a modern processor. And still I wouldn't bring videocards into the discussion.

Games,at least doom 3 and some other recent ones,have good quality sound,worth worriing about.And eax effects and all add alot to the experience so onboard sound wont be perfect for games.Audigy 3 is coming out,I'd like to know when tho.

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will I be able to see a noticable improvement with one of these cards over the onboard sound if I am using the coax spdif out? Quote:



most of the boards that I've been looking at have either nVidia nForce3 Pro 250 GB or VIA K8T800 Pro... the nForce 3 sounds good as it is optimized for nvidia graphics cards, but the higher end cards seem to have the VIA chipset Quote:



thanks for the tip... I'll check to see if any of the boards that I was looking at have this

EDIT: most of the cards that I'm looking at [either ABIT or ASUS] don't list the name of the onboard sound solution, just how many channels and if it has SPDIF... one of the ASUS cards looks interesting [the K8N-E Deluxe]... but it does not mention SPDIF out

"AI Audio (8-channel Audio)
The ALC850 has eight channels of 16-Bit DAC, a stereo 16-Bit ADC, and an AC97 2.3 compatible multi-channel audio designed for PC multimedia systems. The CODEC can also automatically detect and identify what types of peripherals are plugged into the audio I/O jacks and notifies users of inappropriate connection. No more confusion of Line-in, Line-out and Mic jacks." Quote:



will this be an issue if I am only using my headphones?

From what I've read, even people who don't particularly care about sound quality absolutetly hate the quality of most onboard audio on A64 mobos. The nForce 1 & 2 were special because they featured nVidia's SoundStorn technology that was in many ways years ahead of even Creative's cards at the time, and it still even surpasses their latest cards on the digital output side of things, plus the spec demanded a decent AC'97 CODEC so even it's sound quality was much better than most onboard audio. Some people say that when compring FPS between their Audigy-series card and SoundStorm that SoundStorm is actually faster. The Audigy 3 may finally surpass SoundStorm in all areas but we'll have to wait and see. For some unknown reason nVidia dropped SoundStorm for their nForce3 chipset which puts people wanting decent onboard audio with a current platform at a major disadvantage.

soundstorm on the nforce2 platform actually used less cpu cycles than a pci solution, such as the audigy2. I believe nvidia has plans on selling a standalone soundstorm pci sound card.

Maybe I should get something like the chaintech for music then and not worry about the onboard sound of the motherboard I choose...

If I do this and run the SPDIF out into my DAC then into my AMP and always listen to headphones do I need to get a gaming sound card as well? I'm unsure if the EAX effects matter when you are listening through stereo already...

also, does anyone have any ideas about my PSU question? I'll do a search to see if there is anything on this yet, but just in case I thought I would ask again

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As for your PSU question, stick with quality brands like Antec and Enermax. I would think Antec's TruePower 480W and higher will be plenty for your needs. Just remember if you go with 6800 series nVidia video card, you will want to play safe and get at least 500W PSU. Those suck power!! [no pun intended]

As for gaming sound card, EAX is a nice feature but rarely needed unless you play lots of FPS games where positioning is very much necessary. I just use my hi-res output 2-channel and they keep me happy. Do keep in mind that Chaintech's isn't the most game-friendly card around. And when you play music, use Foobar as everyone else here will tell you! Look at Mr. Radar's setup guide.

Another good brand of PSU is Fortron (and Sparkle which is just rebranded Fortron). They under-rate their PSUs. Tom's Hardware rated their 120mm fan 350 watt model at 411 watts and their 80mm fan 350 watt model at 454 watts.