query on sound card and 2.1 speakers

Why do you want to buy a sound card. The on board sound card is enough for driving any 2.1speaker. Also buying a 5.1card for 2.1 makes no sense and would be a waste of money.

My onboard is not very effective and also one channel has given up. It's old mobo with nvidia nforce2 chipset
cheaper basic cards like intex fail to give smooth sampling at 44.1 Khz while recording using relevant apps. Hence looking for upgrade

I notice that most of these PCI cards have Shared Line -In / Mic-In port.
Does this mean it's only one common port. As I understand Mic-In is more suitable for microphone out while Line-In is better for connecting line-out from other devices like TV CArds. I will need to connect TV Card lineout to line-in port

Asus' Xonar DG. cheap and excellent.

Gollum said:

Why do you want to buy a sound card. The on board sound card is enough for driving any 2.1speaker. Also buying a 5.1card for 2.1 makes no sense and would be a waste of money.

Click to expand...

nope. Try MX-5021 with onboard soundcard and then with a good discrete soundcard. There is nothing wrong in getting a multichannel soundcard for a 2.1 setup. infact, most of the soundcards now come with analogue 5.1/7.1 support. Also, when using quality headphones, discrete soundcard like Xonar STX helps a lot (talking about some really good quality headphones). Not to forget the breathing room a decent soundcard gives to chipset on PC while playing HD content.


@OP: If you can increase your budget, go for Altec Lansing VS2621 or vs4121 atleast. This is where the 'real' audio setup starts. for sound card, I would prefer ASUS Xonar series over Creative soundblaster.

The onboard soundcard is enough if one is having entry level or budget speakers like creative sbs series or al bxr1121 or entry level 2.0 speakers.

First of all, this thread should be in the Hardware QnA section. I don't have much expertise in the audio department, so I wouldn't be able to contribute much to this thread but in reply to Gollum, here's what I've got.

Gollum said:

Why do you want to buy a sound card. The on board sound card is enough for driving any 2.1speaker. Also buying a 5.1card for 2.1 makes no sense and would be a waste of money.

Click to expand...

You, sir, are just trolling around. From what I gather from your posts, mostly you have no clue to what you are talking about. Currently, I own an Altec Lansing MX-5021 2.1 speaker system and a Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium sound card. The sound that this combo produces can never be matched by an onboard sound card. Not by the one I have on my Gigabyte 790FX-GD70 at least. You need a good discrete sound card to go along with a high range speaker system.

So, before you start hopping in the mud, be sure to wear the right shoes.