Buying An Audio Card.....

[F1N3ST]

I am going to buy an Audio card for my new PC, but i dont know which 1 will actually take load off the CPU. Thats where i need help. I want a cheap one, dosnt matter if its 5.1 or 7.1 channels.

 

[riekmaharg2]

adding a sound card to your comp want realy take much load of CPU your better of just buying a faster CPU.

 

[Sharkfood]

The cheapest/good performing sound card are the Audio SE PCI's. These can usually be found for under $30.

Anything less I'd say just use the on-board sound. Most on-board soundcards are pretty good, but as you mentioned can use a bit more CPU time.

For benchmarking audio performance, you can use FutureMark's ORB for 3dmark03 which included sound tests. If you have *any* registered 3dmark03 project (free and usable with the free version) you can then look at ORB results for other PC's with various soundcards to see how they performed the sound tests.

There is also RightMark (my personal fave) and I've run pretty exhaustive tests on Intel Pentium D/4 systems between on-board sound and Audigy cards. The difference is like ~4-6% CPU, with even cheap Audigy's maybe hitting 1-2% and integrateds like 7-9%