sound card question

[wrxlvr]

My sound card died last night (Aopen 850 6 channel) and I just bought a Creative SoundBlaster Live! 24 bit 7.1 channel card from Newegg.

Is it an upgrade? I'm having difficulty finding specs on the AOPEN card to compare the two.

[Shamus]

Re: sound card question

I don't have have to specs in front of me but the SB 24 bit is more modern. The fact that the Aopen 850 was produced prior to the release of Windows XP tells me that.

I do know that the Aopen card uses only 16bit data width while the SB uses a 24 bit data width. Plus the SB card supports the more advanced EAX effects like EAX2 and EAX3 while your old one likely only supported EAX1 or 2 at the most.

[wrxlvr]

Re: sound card question

Yeah, the old one supports EAX1 and the new one supports EAX3. I've seen conflicting info on the data width of the AOPEN 850. I've seen both 16 and 32bits listed. 16 bits makes more sense.

As long as it sounds better in BF2, I don't mind. Also, the card going bad was slowing down the computer and creating blue screens. Weird huh?

[Shamus]

Re: sound card question

Yeah, a bad sound card will interfere with the whole PCI bus causing all sorts of difficult to diagnose proplems. The SB card will certianly take more of the CPU load off than the old one which should improve BF2 performance by a few fps.

[wrxlvr]

Re: sound card question

That is great news.