- Jul 7, 2017
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I do, they were all shit. Soundblasters are still technically around but the tech is largely obsolete.reading that just threw me back 25 years to the times when sound cards were a big thing... and could cause so many issues with games.
anyone else here remember the good old Soundblasters?
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The integrated sound chips realtek makes for motherboards blow them out of the water and dedicated external DACs blow those out of the water. Internal high end sound cards were always gonna die out since they were originally created to offload sound processing from the CPU in an era where sound processing was actually a taxing workload for even high end CPU's, which became unnecessary with advances in CPU power and software.
Second, as GPU's got bigger and needed more power they produced more EM radiation as a result, this messed with the analog outputs from the soundcards since they often sat right next to the GPU. Even modern mobo's have to isolate PCB layers for sound output, just making the DAC an external device solved the problem for the high end rigs and for low end internal DACs and amps were enough even with the added distortion.
Modern DACs have gotten to the point where a $80 one is transparent, works off USB, and can output to any analog amp. There is simply no reason for sound cards to exist anymore.
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