advice on a gfx card with sound.

Discussion in 'Videocards - NVIDIA GeForce' started by steel_kelly, Oct 17, 2011.

  1. steel_kelly

    steel_kelly Active Member

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    I stopped building towers before hdmi was on gfx cards so haven't a clue if they all push sound through the hdmi port.
    Ive seen some on scan.co.uk that are cheap as i only want it for a htpc that gets used every now and again.

    do all gfx cards do sound throughput now or do they have sound on board or whats the deal nowadays?

    heres the link to the cheapos ive seen.

    http://www.scan.co.uk/shop/computer-hardware/all/gpu-nvidia/nvidia-geforce-210-pci-e-(16-cores)

    will any of them be ok?
     
  2. Mufflore

    Mufflore Ancient Guru

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    Most soundcards do not have HDMI.
    There are a few HTPC versions with HDMI but there is no point in using them if you want to use sound via HDMI.
    But if you wish to use analogue, these cards will allow you to play the Blu Ray high definition soundtracks on Movies and get much better quality than your amp will likely do.
    Otherwise you need to do a few hacks to get Blu Ray to play high def tracks through other soundcards (they are limited by copy protection).

    Todays graphics cards can pass audio straight to the amp through the graphics cards HDMI out.
    The amplifier will then process the sound and convert it to analogue.

    If your amplifer supports 5.1 (or more) analogue in, you can improve the sound quality by using a good analogue soundcard in your PC.
    There are also some very good USB/SPDIF cards (DACs) dedicated to stereo only, I'm using one of these for music and its quite ace.
    A few 5.1 USB soundcards exist, Creative make one.


    So, if you are happy with the sound quality of you amp, your graphics card will pass the sound straight to the amp.
    If not, get a decent analogue soundcard.

    What amp/speakers do you have?
     
  3. steel_kelly

    steel_kelly Active Member

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    its for a pc that i use to stream gaming tournaments to be honest so not bothered about quality, was just hoping to find out before i buy one that i wont have to use an extra cable for sound like i do with the one that to went pop.

    how does the onboard sound connect to the graphics card to throughput the sound?

    and i usually connect it to a tv in my kitchen.
     
  4. Psycho101

    Psycho101 Guest

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    No form of outside connection to/from a sound card or onboard audio is needed.

    The graphics card has the hardware required to produce a sound output. It will show as a seperate sound device in Windows and will be output to the device connected via HDMI. For example, when I use my Toshiba TV to watch iPlayer while doing something else on my other monitor, it is entirely my GTX 460 that is feeding sound to my TV.
     

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