Built in sound or Sound Card

[geekbyte]

I have the 8RDA+ with the built in sound and lan. I have been using built in sound cards on my last 3 motherboards.

I am thinking of getting a Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS. Or just keep my 8RDA+ SOund.

Question:

If i do get the sound blaster. I have the new nforce2 drivers installed with the SOund drivers. Do i just disable the on board sound from the bios and remove the drivers, reinstalling them with out the sound drivers. or just leave the drivers the way they are???

Thanks

[robbie]

Do the latter, it's best to use an external SC as aposed to the onboard one just about every board out there (though I cold be wrong)

Usually (but not always so please make sure) the sound card will have it's own hardware to decode the sound (rather than relaying on the your cpu to do this like onboards do)
Hope that helps,
Rob

[geekbyte]

So i can just uninstall the Nforce drives and reintall them again, Wonder if it just detects my sound under add/remove hardware then i can just remove the built in sound and go from there.

[timbob2469]

geekbyte, You should be ok if you just disable the onboard sound in bios setup, install the card , and load the new drivers. The old drivers shouldn't get loaded by windows, unlike Videocard drivers. I haven't seen posts where this posed a problem (concerning soundcard drivers ), But changing videocards without removing the drivers, especially when changing between Nvidia and ATI is well documented and causes problems , there are even programs to completely remove the old drivers , Detonator destroyer comes to mind, sometimes moving up to detonators 40.xx from 3x.xx causes problems also and there are programs for that.
http://www.majorgeeks.com/downloads28.html
there are a lot of driver tools there, but I don't see one for "soundstorm fixer" or "audigy adjuster", so you should be OK.
Bob

[chile]

i would stick with soundstorm on board...but since i don't see any other upgrade that you would need or want, i guess an audigy 2 zs wouldn't be a bad idea...

[danrok]

Simply disable the onboard sound, there's no need to remove or uninstall the drivers. Then install the new card as normal.

The onboard sound is not so good for games with high quality sound.

[RandyB]

I just installed a Sound Blaster Live 5.1 (had it laying around and wanted to see if I could make it work before I shelled out the cash for the Audigy 2 ZS) in my 8RDA+ it works great now but a few things to add to the above posters comments: 1 you will need to disable the AC 97 sound and midi port in BIOS. The epox game port will no longer work on my 8RDA+ and I could not get the game port on the sound card to work ( resource conflict) so I went with a USB game controller. 2. You need to remove the onboard sound jumpers on the MB the are at the rear edge, almost under the back edge of the vid card. I lost my manual so I can't tell you which page to look on. 3 install your new sound card boot up and when found new hardware dialog box comes up install the drivers for the new card and your home free