First post, by keropi
- Rank
- l33t++
Hiya!
inspired from the discussion here (Audigy vs. Onboard Realtek HD Audio -- which is better?) I decided to run a series of tests with the PCI soundcards that I have available in order to determine the impact they have in cpu usage...
The system used was my recently acquired p4 system. For the tests I underclocked the cpu from 2.4ghz to 1.2ghz (100mhz fsb instead of the normal 200). The rest of the system is based on a Gigabyte GA-8IK1100 mobo , an AGP GeForce4200ti with 64MB vram , 512MB DDR1 RAM running in dual-channel mode and the OS is WinME with the unofficial SP2 and DirectX 8.2.
(3DMark01 score went from 11.150 to 7.070 points after underclocking)
And now the sound contestants! 😁
a. Turtle Beach Santa Cruz TB400 (crystal CS4630-CM based)
b. SoundBlaster Live! 5.1 SB0060
c. the motherboard's onboard AC97 solution based on the ALC658 chipset
d. Creative's SB PCI ES1371 (rebadged Ensonic AudioPCI)
e. WaveForce 192-XG (yamaha's own implementation of the YMF724E-V chipset)
f. Terratec Integra, an OEM card based on the ForteMedia FM801-AU chipset
... there is an obvious lack of cards here, most notably the Vortex based ones but unfortunately these are the only PCI cards that I kept (since I never really cared about PCI sound for retro-usage except from live! cards)... 😒
Always wanted a vortex2 but never really found one at a nice price... I had a couple of ESS Solo-1 cards too but I donated them to friends for amiga use...
Anyway, the drivers used are the latest WDM ones for each card and if available EAX/DirectSound3D settings were enabled.
And now I present for your viewing pleasure the benchmark results! 😊
(and a direct link in case the forum crops the image: http://i41.tinypic.com/4hf4h2.jpg )
It is apparent that the onboard ALC658 chipset is the overall most cpu hungry solution.
The SB Live! is best in 2D sounds and scores very good in 3D ones.
I also suspect that chipsets scoring better in DS3D than live just produce an inferior 3D quality sound (ie not much processing done).
Either way, it was fun doing the benchmark, I wish I had more cards 😁 😁 😁