[NTLUG:Discuss] Re: Intel motherboards/ built in sound/ PCI soundcards

[Daphne Martindell]

Fred James wrote:
> 
> I have been playing with various configurations on this motherboard for
> about a week now, and here is what I have found/done (YMMV).
> 
> (1) I have disabled that onboard sound (AC'97) in favor of a
> SoundBlaster 16 PCI card.
> (2) I have opted for an ATI XPERT 128 PCI video card instead of an ATI
> Radeon 7500 (AGP) video card.

I have an HP Pavilion with a PCI sound card with a Conexant chipset.
No Linux support for this piece off junk, this according to 
"www.alsa-project.org" and my many attempts to make it work. 

I'm considering buying the $29.99 SoundBlaster PCI-16 sound card at 
Microcenter. But, it is not clear if the drivers are available for Linux 
according to "www.alsa-project.org". 
Does anyone know if the SB-PCI-16 is supported?

Also, Fred mention replacing the AC97 Codec with the SB PCI-16 and 
that this would result in a reduction in sound quality.  Having 
personally worked on AC97 Codec designs at TI, I am suprised the 
SB PCI-16 is worse than AC-97. 
The AC97 codec represents some of the worst compromises I have seen
in the PC audio business.

So, what's a good/better/best PCI soundcard that has Linux drivers? 
I looked at 6 soundcards a Microcenter yesterday, and none of 
them mentioned Linux driver support! While, at the same time I found
3 network cards that said Linux support on the box.

    -steve
      SuSE 7.2,  2.4.4kernel
      HP Pavilion, AMD7