SB Live will support EAX and DirectSound in hardware, which I doubt the VIA chipset will do (I admittedly don't know much about the VIA solution though; so maybe it also does that stuff). If you have games that use those features, that would be a selling point for the SB Live imho. If that doesn't matter either way, the only other selling points for the SB Live that I could see would be connectivity ( does it give you some input/output feature that the onboard lacks?), or signal quality (is the onboard noisy?).

Live was an improvement over every VIA chipset I ever tried, last one was a KT600, but a live 24bit sounded better 🤣

Now if its a realtek audio, I remember the onboard started to sound better with Realtek around 2004/2005

I'd use the SB Live! Better sound, EAX support, actual hardware acceleration and SB16 emulation. If a particular game doesn't work with the Live!'s emulation, just make a startup menu that doesn't start it, enable the VIA onboard sound with legacy mode turned on and play the game.

Thanks. That's helpful.

For interest, this is what the datasheet had to say

• SoundBlaster Pro Hardware and Direct Sound Ready AC97 Digital Audio Controller − Dual full-duplex Direct Sound channels betwee […]
Show full quote

• SoundBlaster Pro Hardware and Direct Sound Ready AC97 Digital Audio Controller
− Dual full-duplex Direct Sound channels between system memory and AC97 link
− PCI master interface with scatter / gather and bursting capability
− 32 byte FIFO of each direct sound channel
− Host based sample rate converter and mixer
− Standard v1.0 or v2.0 AC97 Codec interface for single or cascaded AC97 Codec’s from multiple vendors
− Loopback capability for re-directing mixed audio streams into USB and 1394 speakers
− Hardware SoundBlaster Pro for Windows DOS box and real-mode DOS legacy compatibility
− Plug and play with 4 IRQ, 4 DMA, and 4 I/O space options for SoundBlaster Pro and MIDI hardware
− Hardware assisted FM synthesis for legacy compatibility
− Direct two game ports and one MIDI port interface
− Complete software driver support for Windows-95/98/2000 and Windows-NT

SB Live! is going to sound better, just be aware that some configurations with VIA chipsets had issues with the Live! cards in the past. I recently received a machine equipped with the AMD 761 north bridge and VIA 686B south bridge with an Audigy installed that had no issues, but compatibility problems were a big deal back in 2001 or so.

VIA 686B has a quirk that can cause data corruption on the IDE controller in some situations and SBLive can cause it to happen. In reality, it usually worked fine. Until it didn't. 😁

Anyway yeah that VIA AC97 is basic host-driven audio that's probably on a noisy, low quality analog circuit. Live is going to be better without a doubt. Though the VIA AC97 is probably less troublesome than a Live often is.

Yeah, the 'PCI Latency Bug'. Never been bitten, but have made notes. Some links for the people who end up here by searching,
http://www.vogonswiki.com/index.php/Athlon_Motherboards
PIII, Athlon mobo w ISA slot remommendation
Another Shot: EP-8KTA3 Pro

It seems SBLive's involvement can be mitigated by choice of PCI slot and IRQ. Which is actually covered in the card's manual, and the later is also in the old A7V133 FAQ. For the A7V133 you want slot 3 and set IRQ5 to Legacy in BIOS.

Other preventative voodoo is I'm using the onboard Promise ATA for the HDD.

I also got the impression that VIA and ASUS took the problem seriously back in the day and dealt with it by a BIOS update, but I haven't tracked that down for certain.

It's not just VIA and not just Live. PCI is touchy, especially with Win9x.

Though the VIA 686B bug with IDE is a somewhat separate issue.

swaaye wrote:

It's not just VIA and not just Live. PCI is touchy, especially with Win9x.

Though the VIA 686B bug with IDE is a somewhat separate issue.

never had any issues with windows 98 pci cards, though I avoid VxD drivers when ever possbile as 98 and ME support WDM.

candle_86 wrote:

never had any issues with windows 98 pci cards, though I avoid VxD drivers when ever possbile as 98 and ME support WDM.

Never tried to run a SBLive, PCI IDE/SATA card, and a PCI NIC at the same time maybe? Throw in some USB 2.0 PCI card as well for some more PCI card juggling funs.

Also, you can't use WDM drivers with Creative cards if you want EAX to sound correct in some games.

I did manage to get an SBLive Value, Promise Ultra 100 TX2 & D-Link DFE 530TX+ working together in an Abit KT7A 1.3 non-RAID board (along with a Leadtek Winfast GF3 Ti 200 and Voodoo 2); of course it took me 4 tries, had to assign IRQs manually to each PCI slot, and never used a USB 2.0 card, but everything worked well enough in Win98SE and Win2k for many years. Didn't experience data corruption in any of my 3 hard drives either.

swaaye wrote:

candle_86 wrote:

never had any issues with windows 98 pci cards, though I avoid VxD drivers when ever possbile as 98 and ME support WDM.

Never tried to run a SBLive, PCI IDE/SATA card, and a PCI NIC at the same time maybe? Throw in some USB 2.0 PCI card as well for some more PCI card juggling funs.

Also, you can't use WDM drivers with Creative cards if you want EAX to sound correct in some games.

My KT333 runs a SB Live, uli SATA 2.0 card, and a Rosewill RC-404 Gigabit nic, no issues so far. As for EAX in games, I havn't noticed anything odd, but I'm also using 10 dollar speakers.

JayCeeBee64 wrote:

Didn't experience data corruption in any of my 3 hard drives either.

I had a KT7A for awhile. I don't remember running into data corruption but some people did have it. File corruption isn't necessarily noticeable. It doesn't necessarily kill the OS or programs. It might just cause a little glitch in a video or a music file. This is why some people want filesystems that verify file integrity. Otherwise you need to do something like make parity archives in order to detect corruption.

My KT7A died a terrible death one day when I was messing around inside and a HDD power cable connected to a USB header. 🤣

I just encountered the 686B PCI latency issue right after I installed a SB Live! (CT4760) for the first time. I'm running a Soyo SY-K7VTA Pro 1.0.

I noticed it almost right away as I tried to install two of the games bundled with this card (X-Gamer), Descent 3 and NFS 4. The install would hang just moments after it started copying files from the DVD-RW drive to the HDD. Tried it with two different DVD-RW drives.

I'm not inclined to mess around with this too much because the Vortex 2 and YMF724 are nice alternatives, but I have grown to appreciate the Live's Soundfont capabilities. Would an Audigy have similar issues? I have a plain Audigy and an Audigy 2 (not ZS) that I could try. Just wondering if this is still an "open" issue or whether it has been resolved.

The first thing I would do is try the Live! in other PCI slots.

I would also install the VIA PCI Latency patch. It will reprogram the PCI registers for better compatibility. Win9x, 2K and XP SP1 supported.

I went to georgebreese.com, but it looks like all downloads have been taken off the site. Is there a reputable site to download the latest version?

boxpressed wrote:

I went to georgebreese.com, but it looks like all downloads have been taken off the site. Is there a reputable site to download the latest version?

I've uploaded it to VOGONS Drivers
http://www.vogonsdrivers.com/getfile.php?file … 6&menustate=0,0

Thank you. I found the patch (in a Vogons thread!) just moments before you posted. Right now I'm using v019.

My system now loaded Descent 3 but not without a little weirdness when I had to swap CDs. Also, it installed at about 1/5 the speed it did when I tested with an AWE64.

I can't recall if my 4-in-1 drivers are the latest, so I'll check that next.

Update: the PCI Latency Patch seems to be working fine. I used the v021 beta version this time. The game was installing slowly because the DVD-RW drive was on the fritz.

Now the only problem is that the GM in DOS games run from a Windows DOS box use the crappy default Live! patch set regardless of what I load in AudioHQ. So bizarre, go figure.