Looking to upgrade and I'm looking at the nForce chipset motherboards for an Athlon.

Everyone of them has integrated audio, which I really don't need. Just wondering how good it is, and if it can be disabled and/or coexist peacefully with another soundcard.

I don't know how good they are, but they can be disabled via a jumper on the motherboard. Mine has been coexisting peacefully with an Audigy; no problems so far.

Check out this thread. Asked the same question once, got some useful answers.

Greetz,

Deej

Reading that thread (and reviews) now. Thanks.

Edit: Now I'm trying to figure out if it supports 24bit audio.

I just have switched to an MSI K7N2 Delta. It has a
Realtek ALC650 chip onboard.
I use my Santa Cruz for a while now and will stick with
it, thats sure.
The connector onboard sounds thin without deep bass and
tiny highs.
Even worse is the sound from the S-Bracket for the rears.

The features are very comfortable indeed.

Wombat

Maybe you should look for an nForce board that has nvidia Soundstorm integrated which is one of the reasons the nForce has been hyped. It supports AC3 encoding of any sound signal.

I have an Abit NF7-S Rev. 2.0 and I love it! But you should at least try the audio before you disable it, it's really great. I love the Dolby Digital encoding feature, because it means I only need the one optical cable from my computer to my receiver, whether I'm playing games, DVDs, music, or whatever.

The NForce 2 APU sounds pretty good via digital out but it is resampled to 48khz and according to analysis has some bass roll-off. (Anologue out is via Realtek ALC650 DAC's).

Also the NForce2 boards have a problem with crackling. I haven't noticed the problem with music but if you plan on doing any gaming this is something you should know.

NVIDIA say it will be fixed with the new audio driver but I don't think that's really possible as I've got the same crackling problem when I use my Terratec DMX 6Fire or Audigy 2 for games so its not specific to the APU.

Check out the forums on http://www.nforcershq.com/ for more info.

-dave

Mine seemed fine (MSI K7N2 Delta), but honestly I didn't use it long. I've already got a Santa Cruz, so I just turned off the onboard sound in the BIOS. (I briefly disabled it in Windows, and encountered no problems, even though it was still active in the BIOS.)

It varies widely from board to board because the quality depends on the componets each manufactorer uses. On my nForce classic its quite good, I switched from a SV Live and never looked back.

I believe the crackling was restricted to certain motherboards and was fixed with a BIOS update, and could be worked-around by disabling APIC even before the BIOS fix.

When I first got the board there was no crackling - then at some point I upgraded drivers and I got the crackling with some games - since the latest driver update the crackling has gone away. If you read the forums at nforcershq carefully you will see that there are certain versions of audio drivers that have the crackling and some that don't. Definately it is a good idea to flash your bios to the latest version.

Good luck!

After reading about some of the issues, I'm starting to lean back to an Intel solution.

If I go AMD, it's either VIA (which I have problems with now), nVidia (which is fast, but some people have issues with), or SiS (which I know nothing about).

If I go with an Intel chipset, I can avoid most of the "problems", but get less performance for the price compared to AMD.

It's enough to make me go crazy...

I've followed all the BIOS updates for my Abit NF7-S and also all audio driver updates but unfortunately the crackling is always there. It's not limited to on-board audio either, my Terratec DMX 6Fire LT and my Audigy 2 have the same problem.

-dave

Edit: Can't quote properly when drunk

I have Abit NF7-S v2.0 and the onboard audio (optical out) is quite good. Too bad that somehow I can't get my old Terratec DMX 6Fire to work with this new mobo. I'm having some annoying crackling from the Terratec card while the onboard audio is quite ok. And yes, I have done nearly all that I can think of: changed PCI slots, IRQs, updated BIOS and drivers.

I've been reading some stories about "crackling" problems with the nForce chipset when using a soundcard. Something about spikes on the PCI bus.

turn APIC off

Make sure your DMA buffer size isnt lower than 10ms and that the card has its own irq.

My experience is that the AC'97 codec, which most nForce2 boards use for audio sucks balls. However there is another option, the nForce2 ST (SPP + MCP-T) and GT (IGP + MCP-T) use an altered version of the AC'97 codec which has a built in Audio Processor (APU) and acording to pcstats.com, its pretty good:

http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleID=1365

The CODEC is exactly the same - the information is processed in a dedicated DSP inside the MCP-T southbridge rather than by the CPU.

This along with a couple of other things make the Soundstorm designation mentioned above.
I talked about it in some detail on the second page of the thread deej 1977 linked.

All Nforce solutions are strictly 16 bit only.

Yes, sorry I know that the codec is exactly the same, I wasn't wording things very well.