Nforce 4 soundstorm makeing a comeback?

[martrox]

Doesn't an external digital converter cost a fair bit though?

Well....more than the cost of most soundcards.......and/or motherboards!

 

[Basic]

Until SoundStorm is linked to a *decent* audio codec, I don't see why everyone gets so excited. Nearly CPU free, crap sound. Oh wow!

I'm no audiophile, and only use headphones with my computer. So if you're talking about Dolby N.1 this is irrelevant. But when I first tried my Asus A7N8X DL, I was absolutely shocked about the crap sound. Maybe it 's stupid to think something good could come out of analog circuts on the mb, but this was realy noisy.

Then I realized that I had the volume set very low, even when the sound was high. That is, the sound was muffled digitally, put through the D/A converter at this low level, then went through the built in amp. That's an excelent way of getting as much noise as posible to the output.

I bought an extender cable with a built in volume control, and put it at a level where i could set the volume control in windows at close to max. And now the noise is well below my tinnitus level.

 

[JCLW]

Doesn't an external digital converter cost a fair bit though?

A lot of people just want to use their home theater amps.

 

[Nite_Hawk]

I'd be happy with a card that could do realtime dolby digital encoding so that I can use the coax input on my surround system and have my receiver's crossover work (it doesn't work when using 6-ch direct inputs).

Granted atm I don't think the digital stuff works on the soundstorm in linux, so It's not that big of a deal either way.

Nite_Hawk

? IIRC my ex-NF7-S was perfectly working under RHEL and I never used anything else than its optical output...

Really? I couldn't find a lot of information about it, but it sounded like the digital output with handled by the soundstorm chip. Are you using nvidia's drivers or alsa?

Nite_Hawk

 

[Blade]

The nForce4 does need to hurry up. I want SLI support, badly.

I'm not upgrading until I can get it.

 

[rainz]

The nForce4 does need to hurry up. I want SLI support, badly.

I'm not upgrading until I can get it.

So you'll buy the new nforce 4 mobo + 2 X 6800 Ultra PCIe ?

RainZ

 

[Blade]

Rainz: Over the long-term, something like that. Maybe 2 GT's.

I initially wanted to go with an AMD solution with PCI-E so I could upgrade my video card without having to worry about AGP losing support. SLI was just icing on the cake, now I'm 100% sure I want to go to PCI-E and the nForce4 for that flexibility.

So, even if I max out my CPU.. I can go to dual-GPU's and conquer new games. Don't forget the SM3.0 support.

An SLI-ed Socket 939 mobo is about as future-proof as it gets right now.

 

[rainz]

Can you imagine the case temp with 2 cpu + 2 gpu overclocked.

RainZ