Sound Blaster live - performance comparison to onboard sound?

[MartyNg]

I'm no sound fanatic but I just realized that I have a SBLive! card in storage. I am currently using the onboard sound from my motherboard in my cabinet. Would my performance increase or decrease if I install the SBLive?

Windows XP
512 RAM
Athlon XP 2400+

Thank you.

[xmenxmen]

Basically speaking, on cpu hungry app, the processing of the sound will be offload from the cpu if using something like the sound blaster live (due to built-in sound processor on card).  In respect to mame, I have not really found anything that will even sweat the cpu a bit unless you are running some of the modern games. 

I would say it would slightly increase the performance if you are running something that are cpu hungry, otherwise nope.  In your case, if it's just seating around, just put it in there.

Sound quality wise, there's no difference in mame.

[Malenko]

the improvement in sound in MAME is minimal, as is the performance increase, but i dropped some cheddar upgrading my on board sound to a X-Fi sound card from creative and the sound quality on MP3s and stuff is amazing.if you have an extra card just lying around, put it in, free upgrade imo

[TOK]

The original SBLive card is a rather notorious resource hog. I ended up pulling one in favor of on board sound after reading an article on the subject and doing a speed comparison with on board vs. SBLive... Its been a few years, but I gained about 10FPS with the onboard (NForce) sound. Didn't notice a difference in sound quality.

[RayB]

That's really interesting. First time I've heard of the card using up resources. Maybe much of the "work" is done via the driver in those old ones. Good to know though. Maybe I should switch my old DOS MAME to use on-board instead, and free up some performance....

HOWEVER, my experience with on-board is that you get a lot more interference noise (just moving my mouse around would cause noise). An SB Live has a real low "noise floor" and you won't get interference. So, it's up to you and what you prefer...

[TOK]

I went back and tried to find the article, without success. It was on one of the popular gamer sites like Sharkyextreme, and used the 3DMark software as a benchmark. This might all be irrelevant to MAME, but it made a substantial difference in current games at the time.

It also only applied to the standard SBLive!, not the later Audigy, etc.

[MartyNg]

The original SBLive card is a rather notorious resource hog. I ended up pulling one in favor of on board sound after reading an article on the subject and doing a speed comparison with on board vs. SBLive... Its been a few years, but I gained about 10FPS with the onboard (NForce) sound. Didn't notice a difference in sound quality.

Now that you mention that, I think I may have read the same or a similar article. Perhaps I'll stick with the onboard sound since it's a fairly recent ASUS mobo. Thanks!