Hi all! I have done a bit of scrounging around the house and found a USB Sound Blaster LX and I was wondering if it would be better to use that rather than the built in sound on my motherboard? My motherboard has a realtek 7.1 sound card. I have an Acer M1800 pc. I know that a pci express or pci card might be better, but I was looking for a stop gap thing.

- Does USB give better frame rates, or do they both use the same sort of CPU power?
- Does the USB card give a better sound quality than the Realtek builtin?

I have looked all over the internet for this info, and can't find it. I was hoping someone around here was knowledgeable about this.

How old is the Sound Blaster LX? If it is more then a couple of years your onboard is probably better.

How old is the Sound Blaster LX? If it is more then a couple of years your onboard is probably better.

It's about 2 years old

Were you in call of duty 4 a while ago asking how to get better frame rates? If that was you, disable sound all together & see how much of a CPU hog your onboard sound is before going & trying other hardware. If you're not that guy then ignore this post.

no that wasnt me, though it is a valid idea. I think I might try that! thanks!

If you're not that guy from some random place, and have a slightly similar yet almost unrelated problem, then please ignore this post too.

Were you that guy who was just down at the IGA asking me for money? I'd assume to buy a soundcard? If so, sorry, I didn't have any change on me, but if not please ignore this.

most onboard soundcards are pretty lame.
depends on what you wanna do.....
write the technos with the vst's?
you'll need an external or at least an internal with asio
and low latency...

if its just for games, just go with whats easiest.........
i think gorganus had one of them soundblaster externals.....ask him

I laughed Khel.

If you're not that guy from some random place, and have a slightly similar yet almost unrelated problem, then please ignore this post too.

How is it unrelated? A dude with that exact same computer came into the server I was playing on asking how to get more FPS and this line in his post asks about getting more FPS

Does USB give better frame rates, or do they both use the same sort of CPU power?

last edited by whoop at 19:17:04 26/Jan/10

you only need 24fps anyway

given the cpu power we have to spare these days, optical out (onboard) is fine for games/moofies/moosic.

for headphones I still prefer my SB pci card - those it needs to be said I have to install all the Creative crap to get the sound just right.

Pointing to the DRIVERS folder and just getting the card to work sounds flat and dull. I don't notice the overhead with the Creative software running like I used to though

built-in sound on my motherboard sucks! I have no idea what it is, I have some soundmax control panel thing. but when there is no sound playing, I can hear like weird white noise through the headphones, and it changes depending on what my CPU is doing (I assume cuz there's no shielding or whatever and little changes in the electro-juice cause weird effects in the soundcard chip thingamatron).

It's not so bad that I care enough to do anything about it but I reckon that USB sound would be heaps better for me

Yep, my experience with onboard sound is terrible - particularly noisy on the mic channel. Similar experience to trog, CPU load changes the pitch.