Onboard LAN & Sound

[Rob R.]

Does anyone know which one of these degrades overall system performance the most or am I best off to just replace them both with PCI cards?

[leprechaun_40]

I don't think they'd degrade performance per say, but the sound card won't be what you'd call top of the line. As for the lan, if it works as well as most 10/100 cards, leave it. That way you have another pci slot for something else. If you don't like it's performance, then by all means, disable and install a card.:t

[Ammok]

Use the onboard sound and see what you think, as leppy says. The quality of the sound will probably be related to the quality of the sound chip used on your mobo. I got a good one and have left my pci 5.1 sound card out of my current set up becuase the onbaord sound is better.

[Optimus Prime]

I have good onboard sound in my mobo.

Don't have onboard LAN though, had to install a card.

[Ammok]

Oh yeah, I got a 3com and a Nvidia LAN ports as well, works far better than any pic nic i have used previously, no performance drop with an athlon 1.4 in cpu slot.

[areid1957]

I have a Soyo Dragon board with all the bells and whistles. I use the machine for editing video and music. I had to change to a stand alone sound card (SB live value) because when I captured video or sound from an external source like a vcr or cassette deck it would capture a hissing sound. I did some research on the Cmedia chip and it and turns out it is the cmedia sound chip on the board. When I switched to the SB it stopped. I know that alot of MB use this Cmedia chip so watch out if you are going to use it for this purpose. If not the onbpard ethernet and sound will work fine. It also has onboard raid which i just used as extra ide contollers but that worked until I tried to burn DVD,s. I had both hard drives connected to separate cables on the raid controllers and my optical drives were connected to the primary,s on the 1 & 2 controllers. The DVD burner would almost always fail to burn successfully. I moved all the drives to the 1 & 2 controllers and it works fine now. That was probably a driver issue though. All in all the onboard stuff may be ok depending on what and how you use it but it can be hit or miss. I would recommend using the onboard stuff untill you have a problem. As soon as you develop problems though that is the first place to look.

[Rob R.]

I have the MSI K7N2-L that has AC97 sound which I understand is as good as my SB Live 5.1. I decided to go ahead and use the AC97 and the onboard LAN while I was at it but....the other day I went to listen to some MP3's and had plugged in my headphones to do it. I placed the headphones on my head before I started playing any music and could quite clearly hear the actions of my NIC card. This was not audible over my speakers before but is definitely there over the headphones. When I began to play the music it went away. I am still not sure what to really think about that. Anyway, I had always assumed (I know, I know..the assume thing) that onboard LAN was not as fast as PCI LAN but couldn't seem to back up that statement from a legitimate source. I thought I might just bring it here to see what the general consensus was on it.

Thanks for all the posts guys.

[RayH]

Depends. Using onboard chips may or may not be as good as PCI slot card devices. But using onboard chips gives better air flow!