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HD Audio vs Audigy 1

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Dirge
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HD Audio vs Audigy 1

Sat Sep 23, 2006 11:23 pm

I saw an old 2004 review of HD Audio on Digit-Life where they conclude the Audigy and Realtek ALC880 sound almost alike. Digit-Life noted only a slight advantage with the Audigy. How does the original Audigy fare when put up against the latest iteration of HD Audio codecs? Would it be worth transferring an Audigy to a new HD Audio motherboard?
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Choz
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Mon Sep 25, 2006 2:00 am

The original Audigy is pretty much a very minor revision of the old sound blaster Live 24-bit so no real benefit in sticking one on a board which already has onboard sound.

The cavaet is of course the fact that onboard sound will use a bit more of your CPU power than a pci card will but we're only talking ~2%
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Dirge
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Thu Sep 28, 2006 8:24 pm

One advantage of the Audigy is it's support of EAX 4.0 in games. But I don't know what fidelity is like in comparison with HDA.

[edit] I found this interesting article on Daily Tech discussing how Realtek’s high definition audio solutions do not render EAX or EAX2 audio properly. [/edit]
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Sickocrow
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Tue Oct 03, 2006 4:28 pm

The audigy 1 will do EAX4, but it comes at a massive cost of CPU usage. I updated my Audigy to the EAX4 drivers, and Rightmark testing had a jump of about 8% CPU usage.
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Dirge
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Tue Oct 03, 2006 4:38 pm

I thought the original Audigy supported EAX 4.0 in hardware, and Audigy SE and LS were software-based. Is this true or am I blowing smoke?
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20dB@10Hz
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Tue Oct 03, 2006 6:33 pm

Choz wrote:
The original Audigy is pretty much a very minor revision of the old sound blaster Live 24-bit

I might be wrong but I think it is the other way round. 16 bit Audigy was realeased about 2001 when XP came around. They came up with Live 24 bit later. It is better then Audigy for music playback due to 24 bit processing but has no hardware EAX acceleration so not that good for gaming.
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Sickocrow
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Fri Oct 06, 2006 9:40 pm

Dirge wrote:
I thought the original Audigy supported EAX 4.0 in hardware, and Audigy SE and LS were software-based. Is this true or am I blowing smoke?


It certainly seems to. I updated the driver so I could use EAX in BF2, but the performance hit was massive. So I rolled back to the older driver and switched off EAX.
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