On the A7N8K this sound system is included

http://www.nvidia.com/view.asp?IO=feature_soundstorm

6 channel out and a spdif out on the board, i plan on using the spdif and connecting it to my dolby 5.1 decoder.

How's the quality of this audio chipset? Any experiences or can you pull anything from that data about the quality of this audio chip?

A7N8K?
I've got the A7N8X with the Soundstorm - hooked up to a 6 (5.1) speaker setup and the sound is quite good - clear, sharp, works well with movies encoded with AAC. I imangine the SPdif works well.

But now the problem: Recently in the last few months - when playing music it will all of a sudden introduce so much distortion, as is there is a feed-back loop. I have tried cutting out all other sources but the type playing, tested another type of speakers to make sure that wasn't the problem. updated Bios & sound drivers but the problem still exists. Tried with different players (winamp, WMP, FB2k) but the same problem - I would cue up an album and then after a few songs of normal playing - it would just introduce all this noise - as if the output amp signal was saturated. I'm not sure what to do at this point - I guess I'll look around the net if others are having similar problems. I guess ultimatly I cound put in another sound card but it seems a waste to have onboard audio and not use it.

I don't know if this distortion is/will affect you MB and if the SPdif will be affected - I haven't got any spdif equipment to try it.

Other than the sound problem the MB has been rock stable - very happy with it - the only thing I miss is being able to O/C the CPU

I've heard the A7n266-c is a little better then the newer A7n8X, but it could just be FUD. Regardless my A7n266-c sounds great.

Happy with the a7n8x for sound in general. Games sound great using the dolby digital encoder to my home cinema amp. Only slight bother is having to switch it back to pcm 2 speaker mode after playing games which can be a bit annoying. Have had an occasional slight problem with it that i haven't been able to isolate which is most obviously manifested in a weird noise that becomes apparant when the amp is cranked and no sound is being played on the computer- although it remains at all times when it is present.

AFAIK, nforce2 resamples, even using digital output.

It's pretty good for games, will work well for DVD movies, but for CD playback you'd be better off bying a cheap cmi9738 card with digital output to go with your nforce. Then you can get "true" 44.1 kHz playback.

ASUS is not good at making audio board up to now no matter how good the snd chip is. So, i think, if you want to have reliable sound from your PC, you should go to buy a reliable sound card.

Somewhat O/T really, but can you explain what you mean? There are very few boards around that are better suited to overclocking than this one. You can adjust the multiplier, voltage, FSB, etc., what more do you want?

You're talking about the A7N8X-Deluxe, right? The non Deluxe has no Soundstorm. Digital sound should be quite good, analog, no, not really. Uses Realtek.

Overclocking... well, the A7N8X is surely able to overclock (quite a few options), although the Abit NF7-S is better. Able to reach FSBs of 200+, adjust chipset voltage (so you can reach the 200+) etc. Soundwise it should be the same as the Asus.

I assumed that we were talking the deluxe since the regular doesn't have the sound.

For the overclocking I was actually meaning the CPU - I had my old 1.2 AMD T-Bird that was not locked so I could O/C without any modification.
When I switched to the A7N8X I put in an AMD 2400XP which is locked until you modify it. I haven't bothered with that (as yet). So no complaints about the O/C of the MB - I ramped up the FSB to 160MHz before the CPU siezed which is about all the O/C you can do until you modify the CPU to access the internal multiplier.

That distortion seems to getting worse everytime I play music now - on the next reboot I guess I will stick in the SBLive - leaves me with a bad feeling about the ASUS sound. I'll check around and see what I can come up with about this problem.

Hell, if you are that concerned about cd playback without resampling you could always go the whole hog and buy a cd player....
Really i can't see why people get so hung up about the resampling issue. As long as the windows multimedia control panel has resampling at best it is extremely unlikely that you will be able to hear any reduction in quality as a result of resampling. And frankly, if you are getting a brand new asus mother board and athlon to go with it it is not likely to be taking more than 10% cpu to resample the audio in real time using top quality ssrc.
I really doubt that the technically (if probably not perceptibly) lossless advantage of having a 44.1khz sound card will offset the hassle of switching around whenever you want to play a game or whatever, not to mention the (admittedly small) added cost and lost expansion slot.

Ehh, after seeing iffy reviews from you guys, I think i'll hold off. I'm SO SICK AND TIRED of my motherboards having problems, I'm not willing to buy another one that has glitches, bugs that just annoy the hell out of me. Sorry </rant>

Thanks for the input though, i think i'm actually going to hold onto my p3 600 and wait it out till maybe a newer nforce2 board comes out, or go and get an epox 8rda+ (w/o spdif =/

I don't know of any other nforce2 board that do spdif though..

I've got an epox 8rda+, but I've turned off the onboard sound. I'm not so sure that any onboard sound is a good idea with win2k or xp, given that the sound driver will most likely share an IRQ with some other component, typically the USB driver. On another MB I played with, every time I moved my USB mouse, the sound made a buzzing noise. And when I viewed an AVI, there was a constant, annoying background throbbing noise. The sound driver IRQ was being shared with both USB and graphics, and there was no way for me to move it around.

If you buy a separate card, at least you can move the card around until it gets an IRQ to itself.

ff123

The ABit NF7-S has s/pdif out (Optical).

BTW - If you have APIC enabled in the BIOS of an NForce 2 board the on-board components will share IRQ's but if you disable APIC components have their own IRQ's as long as you don't have them all enabled and too many PCI cards. Plus, the SoundStorm has big problems with crackling when APIC is enabled anyway.

-dave

/off topic, sorry

The A7N8X unlocks all the newer AthlonXP chips, including the 2400+. Try changing the multiplier, it should work. Two examples: 16x133 or 13x166 (using the 1/5 PCI divider) should be trivial with stock cooling.

http://forum.oc-forums.com/vb/forumdisplay...p?s=&forumid=44
and
http://www.amdforums.com/forumdisplay.php?&forumid=8
http://www.hardforums.com/forumdisplay.php...hp?s=&forumid=6