Intel 845 DDR Motherboard Roundup - December 2001

Onboard Sound Performance

Luckily, none of the motherboards had any issues with their onboard sound in terms of audio quality. All of the solutions would work just fine for your basic audio needs regardless of whether you're just listening to music, playing a game or want to hear Windows' sounds and alerts. The only reason you'd want to pursue a more advanced audio solution is if you have a 4.1 or 5.1 speaker setup in which case you can either limit yourself to one of the boards with the CMedia 6-channel chip (and the appropriate connectors) or buy a PCI sound card.

This performance section is intended to see how much of a performance hit is incurred by using these onboard audio solutions.

Onboard Sound Performance Audio Winbench 99 (CPU Utilization - 16-bit, 32 voices, streaming) AOpen AX4B Pro ABIT BD7-RAID ECS P4IBAD Soltek SL-85DR-C FIC VC15 Intel D845BG DFI NB70-SC Soyo P4I Fire Dragon Chaintech 9BJD0 MSI 845 Ultra Gigabyte P4 Titan DDR 0.8 1.0 1.09 1.09 1.09 1.29 2.11 9.15 9.22 9.29 10.5 | 0 | 2 | 4 | 6 | 8 | 11 | 13

The majority of the boards here don't exhibit any unusually high CPU utilization percentages during the Audio Winbench 99 tests with the exception of the Soyo, Chaintech, MSI and Gigabyte offerings. The Chaintech, MSI and Soyo boards all use the same CMedia 6-channel audio chip while the Gigabyte board uses a Creative Labs DSP in addition to a Sigmatel AC'97 codec. It's clear that these more advanced offerings eat more CPU time than the basic AC'97 counterparts while produce very few audibly tangible benefits.

The Gigabyte P4 Titan DDR board is the only one with a separate DSP and AC'97 codec which would allow you to disable the Creative Labs chip and just use the Sigmatel codec which would dramatically reduce that CPU utilization.

Onboard Sound Performance Return to Castle Wolfenstein (Percent drop with sound on - lower is better) DFI NB70-SC ECS P4IBAD Soltek SL-85DR-C AOpen AX4B Pro ABIT BD7-RAID FIC VC15 Intel D845BG Gigabyte P4 Titan DDR Soyo P4I Fire Dragon MSI 845 Ultra Chaintech 9BJD0 9.6 9.6 9.8 10.2 10.3 10.3 10.4 11.4 11.7 14.6 14.9 | 0 | 3 | 6 | 9 | 12 | 15 | 18

The performance drop seen when enabling sound in RtCW is approximately 10% for most motherboards, while the MSI and Chaintech both approach 15%. This seems like more of an implementation issue as the Soyo P4I Fire Dragon uses the same CMedia chip yet it incurs a smaller performance drop with sound enabled.

Here we can see that in spite of the heavy CPU utilization of the CMedia and Creative Labs solutions, the 2GHz Pentium 4 is able to eat most of the performance hit.