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

[Fred James]

(This message from the Fred mentioned below)

Short story - go with the SB 16 PCI card - it is fine.

For the long version, continue reading.

Please allow me to clarify the "reduction in sound quality" I spoke of 
in my installation, as well as a couple of other points.

(1) The loss in sound quality I spoke of was as heard in the "guest OS" 
inside of VMWare installed on Linux.
     (a) The sound was fine in Linux itself
(2) The AC'97 chipset I spoke of is onboard (built into the motherboard)
     (a) I have heard from folks who have had success in Linux with 
AC'97 PCI cards
     (b) I have not heard as yet from anyone who has had success in 
Linux with an onboard sound device of any kind
         (  i) So far, no response from the author of the Linux Sound 
HowTo - but I'm not complaining - whenever he gets to it is just fine 
with me
(3) I am not having any problem with the SB 16 PCI card, either in Linux 
or Windows.

Could I recommend the SB 16 PCI card?  Seems good to me.

I bought the Intel D845BG motherboard (D845BGL, actually) to run a 
Pentium 4, 2.0GHz CPU, and carry a lot of memory (512 MB's installed). 
I bought the SB 16 PCI Card because I wasn't sure I could get the built 
in sound to run under Linux, but I was pretty sure the SB card would.

Hope this helps


Daphne Martindell wrote:

> 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
> 
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> 
> 
> 


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