I'm planning to buy a new AMD Athlon 64 3000+ processor, which requires that I also buy a new socket 754 motherboard. While I'm not necessarily in the market to upgrade my audio right now, all of the motherboards I'm considering happen to have onboard audio. Though I appreciate fine sound quality, I'm not going to go out and buy an Audigy 2 or Audiophile card; I don't have the extra money and if I did, I'd rather spend it on better components for my home audio system, but I'll gladly consider one mobo over another if I can get a sound upgrade included. Thus, my question is this: does anyone have experience with any of the onboard audio on the boards I'm considering (listed below) for better or for worse? Also, I have a Sound Blaster Live Value 5.1 that I can steal from my old system. I know that the SBLive is far from the best audio PCI card out there, but would this be a better bet than any of the onboard options or not?

Here are the possible choices...

on boards with an nVidia nForce3 150 chipset:
- Realtek ALC658
- VIA ENVY 24PT

on boards with a VIA K8T800 chipset:
- Realtek ALC655
- Realtek ALC658
- VIA VT1720 Evny 24PT
- Analog Devices AD1980

or, alternatively:
- use the old SB Live Value 5.1 PCI card

Any experiences/suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

The Live isn't so bad when configured correctly. My friend has one, which I've been playing with.

It will probably save some cpu activity if you don't use onboard sound, but then, this will be only a few percent.

As to the codecs you're mentioning: the ALC655 is the least sophisticated of those.

Playback quality however is very dependent on motherboard design. Good ALC655 implementations are to be preferred over bad ALC658 implementations. If the power circuitry isn't thought over, or the codec is placed too far from the output sockets, you'll be suffering hiss and funny sounds on disk activity or so.

I too would go for the Sblive, but the combination of SBlive and VIA chipset gives me the creeps... I have no idea if this is any issue whatsoever with the newer chipsets from VIA, but VIA+Creative used to be a horrific combination.

Before you buy that MB I would check it out thouroughly that they have fixed those issues... if you decide to use the Sblive of course...

I was asking myself the same question, read my recent "sound card advice"-request here.
Quality doesn't necessarily depend on the chip only. Since onboard-audio solutions are surely using the cheapest amps, sockets, connectors etc. available, I would expect some additional negative influence on the quality there. And I'd be surprised if the output of the chip was not processed in any way but directly put on the RCA socket from the chip's pins.. but maybe that's how it's done these days, I don't know. Then there would still be the issue of worse shielding than a more expensive solution's.

The quality of the analog output of the Intel ICH5's sound on my Asus P4C800 (P4 is usually a better choice than the faster AMD XPs currently) is clearly inferior to the sound of my old SB Live 5.1, which wasn't very good either and definitely beaten by my old, cheap Sony CDP-511 player's DAC+output.
So, unless you have a HiFi D/A-converter and a working SP/DIF output (which didn't work for my as you can see in my other post) I wouldn't use either of these if you want to play back music. Audigy 2s are cheap and the Terratec Aureon 5.1 is even cheaper (EUR 50) so I see no reason to save these few bucks there, but if you absolutely have to use what you've got, I'd definitely go with the SB Live.
BTW, are you upgrading your board+CPU without upgrading the DRAM? That could seriously cut down the performance gain.

Research on Chipsets show the VIA offerings to be problematic, especially if you plan to run Linux. The Intel and NVidia chipsets are much more solid and trouble free.
The VIA ENVY 24PT sound chip should provide better audio than you have now, so long as you choose a solid board manufacturer. ASUS and Gigabyte have gotten very good reviews on Tomshardware.com and Anandtech.com.

I have read such VIA chipset sound horror stories on this board before, and I initially refused to consider VIA at all for the mobo, but after reading several positive reviews at places like tomshardware.com and anandtech.com, plus seeing how well the various VIA-based socket 754 boards are selling, I couldn't ignore the VIA option. I'd like to think that perhaps they worked out their sound problems before releasing this new chipset, but I have no evidence to back that up. Does anyone have any experience specifically with the VIA K8T800?

Am I correct in thinking that the VIA ENVY 24PT is the same or very similar to the chip at the heart of the M-Audio Revolution 7.1?


The ASUS deluxe board (VIA chipset) is also the board of choice of alienware.com and falcon-nw.com for their Athlon64 high-end gaming systems. Not that I'm building a gaming machine here, but I think it's a good barometer of quality... unless of course these compaines just simply have a deal with ASUS (no idea).

This link indicates an AGP lock issue with the K8T800.



http://www.a1-electronics.net/AMD_Section/...-Max3_pg2.shtml

Oh, no, no. I'm also getting a new gig of RAM (PC3200/DDR400, not sure what brand yet but looking at Crucial and Corsair, and I still don't understand timing issues) and a new case with better cooling/airflow. That's it, though, since cash is an issue. I just didn't think it relevent to mention in my original post.

Well, I'm working in a big computer shop and from my experience, most of the users are very satisfied from the onboard soundcard (designing a PCI soundcard is now a challenge)

Now we're on a board where people like sound quality, my very first choice would be an Audigy LS, it's pretty cheap and the quality for the price is very good, even if the card is based on the old Sound Blaster Live chip...

VIA problems with the SB Live were fixed with the introduction of their first usb2.0 supporting southbridge (I'm too lazy to look up the name, something like 8235), iirc. The problem was, their earlier designs didn't support the PCI bus parking option.

Ddrawley: the agp-lock is only interesting for overclockers. Why overclock anything with current hi-speed procs? Also, according to the guy from lostcircuits, the nforce3 doesn't do any better: http://www.lostcircuits.com/motherboard/nforce3_pci/

You're getting one GB of RAM but you don't want to spend 70 EUR for a decent sound card? Oh well ;). While you're at it, also understand the compatibility problems between DRAM and current motherboards as well as the single/double sided issue. Have fun, I got myself fairly cheap Mushkin Level One since anything faster is either potentially incompatible, ridiculously expensive for a few percent of additional performance, or both.
>512 MB is usually only needed for demanding applications like certain image processing operations. I have 1 GB since my box runs weeks to months without rebooting at a time, causing memory leaks to come into effect. Plus I have to run stuff like Java IDEs. Else I would have saved the 100 EUR.
I'm closing this off-topic post with the remark that most overclocked systems cannot be called stable. Unless you can run both memtest86 and a compilation of a large code base (Linux kernel, GNU libc) for a whole day in a loop without any error, the system should not be called stable. Most strongly OCed systems would fail within minutes at most.
My P4 2.8 HT runs at 3.1 GHz and I consider 10% the fastest reasonable OC _without_ having good airflow (sound absorbing case here). The remaining 5-10% CPU/FSB-clock that would be possible with loads of fans and noise are definitely not worth it, I'm through with that nonsense.