Intel Core Duo: AOpen i975Xa-YDG to the Rescue

Audio Performance

We limited audio testing to the Rightmark 3D Sound version 2.2 CPU utilization test and tested with sound enabled to show the performance effects on several games. The Rightmark 3D Sound benchmark measures the overhead or CPU utilization required by a codec or hardware audio chip.

The Realtek ALC-880 HD audio codec on the AOpen board was tested with the recently released 1.36 driver set. The Realtek DirectSound audio drivers do not support more than 32 hardware buffers and the OpenAL 1.1 drivers do not support more than 30 hardware buffers at this time so the scores cannot be directly compared to the Creative Labs Sound Blaster X-Fi cards in the benchmarks.

It is interesting to note the reduced CPU utilization with the Core Duo or Opteron 165 as the load is balanced between each processor with the Realtek 1.36 drivers and the Creative drivers to a certain extent. However, these CPU utilization rate improvements with the dual-core setup does not have any bearing on actual game benchmarks as the reduction in frame rate percentages are the same as our single core score.









The Realtek ALC-880 codec offers very competitive CPU utilization rates when compared to the Realtek ALC-882 on the Asus board. The ALC-880 generates significantly better audio quality than the AC97 based systems and very similar audio quality to the ALC-882 solution. The ALC-880 was released before the ALC-882 but has nearly the same audio quality and performance in our testing. Our subjective headphone testing revealed a slight difference between the two codecs, with the output from the ALC-882 sounding clearer in the treble and mid-range tones. However, the difference was negligible when utilizing our 4, 5.1, or 7.1 speaker setup in a typical room environment. The Sound Blaster X-Fi has the lowest overall CPU utilization (single core systems) with the ALC-880 and the ALC-882 following closely. Let's find out how these results translate into real world numbers.







The audio performance numbers remain consistent as the Realtek ALC-880 consistently finishes near the SoundBlaster X-Fi in the benchmarks. Serious Sam II has an average loss of 37%, Battlefield 2 at 28%, and F.E.A.R. at 2%. F.E.A.R. is extremely GPU limited so the CPU has additional cycles to generate the audio streams required by the Realtek drivers.

The overall output quality of audio with the Realtek ALC-880 ranks with the ALC-882/883 series as the best of the on-board HD audio solutions we have heard to date, while performance continues to improve with each driver release. The vast majority of users should have no issues utilizing the ALC-880 as their primary audio solution considering the quality of audio and performance at this time in most applications.

Obviously, if you are a serious gamer, then a dedicated sound card is still useful to ensure consistent frame rate averages across a wide variety of games, and in the case of the Sound Blaster X-Fi, you also get improved audio quality and EAX3/4/5 support. If you'd like more details on the Realtek solution, you can refer to the Realtek ALC-880 Specifications.