Next Gen Sound Cards: PCIe?

Published on January 12, 2007 By Zoomba In WinCustomize News

It happened years ago when sound cards moved from ISA slots to PCI as the cards and what they did became more complex. Could a similar shift be about to happen? Creative Technology, maker of the defacto-standard in PC audio cards, the Sound Blaster line, were showing off their first audio card for the PCI Express bus at CES 2007.

Pretty soon there won't be any devices left that use the old PCI bus. PCIe could become the universal bus for expansion cards in PCs in the next few years, with graphics card makers already migrating to it, away from the aging AGP standard.

Comments

thomassen

on Jan 12, 2007

PCIe ports is one reason for me to consider upgrading my PC. It's 3.5 years old, but still runs well and got a Vista rating of 4.1. But for instance, I won a new graphics card recently, 'Great!', I thought... then realised that it was a PCIe and my comp only do AGP or PCI. Seeing how more and more accessory use PCIe I might have to upgrade my motherboard just to be able to plug in any new components.

sixshot

on Jan 13, 2007

The main problem right now is adoption and migration. There are so many PCI-based cards out there ranging from USB/FireWire controllers to TV tuners to audio cards and even ultra-low-end graphic cards. There's already a PCI Express x1 graphics card based on the ATI chip. But it's agonizing to see that there's hardly any other devices using the PCI Express bus. Things like TV tuners and audio cards are two components that I want on my next system I upgrade to. Yet what good are they if hardly any company release any hardwares using this? Sure, fall back to PCI is okay at best. But as mentioned, AGP is phasing out...

I'm all for progress. But it's ridiculous that Creative Labs, who holds a monopoly on add-on sound cards, is finally bringing out a PCI Express sound card. They were questioned some time ago regarding this very thing... and they cited some problem related to the PCI Express system or some other as their excuse for not bringing one out. I still think that's a bunch of bull considering that PCI Express has been around for so long.

Waiting around on this entire "chicken or the egg" ordeal has me up in arms about PCI Express in general. Sure they're great in graphics cards. There's no doubt about that. But it's been what seems like eons ago that PCI Express was first introduced. Since then, we've seen motherboards put in PCI Express x1 slots in there which remain unused and unnecessary to this very day. PCI Express x16 might as well be called "AGP v2.0" for that matter. It's been doing nothing but being a graphics card slot for those who have it.

If CL has the time and money to bother with a x1 audio card, perhaps they should do something about their drivers too. Despite the fact that I use their products, their drivers need the most work in 1) robustness, 2) optimization, 3) stability, 4) options, and 5) interface.

Yeah, I'm ranting a lot on this. It's nice to know that there is progress on something that should have been more widely adopted years ago. But I'm disappointed in seeing various companies (ATI, AverMedia, Hauppauge, Creative Labs) slacking behind in developing, manufacturing, and selling multimedia cards that uses a PCI Express x1 slot. To me, those x1 slots are nothing more than useless and wasted space.

Mark Allshouse

on Jan 13, 2007

"To me, those x1 slots are nothing more than useless and wasted space."

So True!

As far as Creative goes, they drove me right to onboard sound with their terrible drivers and even worse customer support.

Fuzzy Logic

on Jan 13, 2007

I gave up on Creative a long time ago for the same reason. Horrible drivers, awkward installs, lousy support etc.

I'm in the market for a good sound card, but It won't be Creative if I can help it.

Adam Michael

on Jan 13, 2007

Hey wait a minute, I just installed a new mobo with sli. Now running twin graphic cards is really nice. Does this mean that I now have to look forward to running two video cards and quite possibly two sound cards?? Aw man.........that would be very cool. Of course I can also envision towers the size of a suitcase too so that all this stuff can be crammed in there. Not to mention someone will have to invent an eight core tri level cpu. Omg..........the cooling fans for all of this stuff.....holy mackeral. Fans the size of baseball gloves maybe even freon based cooling systems. This is gonna be cool. I just hope I can get the new mobo for under a grand. Build don't buy, thats what I say. See ya

Maybe I can be the one to invent a motorized tower, one that will follow you to the lan party

Fuzzy Logic

on Jan 13, 2007

I'm running 2 7600GTs and it's great. I think 2 sound cards is a bit OTT though

cerendir

on Jan 13, 2007

Multiple soundcards have been possible for years, though unless you need extra inputs for audio recording there's not much point in it. Or maybe if you want to be the first one on your block with 14.2 surround

Threi

on Jan 13, 2007

i havent used the pci bus for anything for years now...and i am still on AGP 8x...yep the PCI bus is becoming obsolete like ISA...

as for sound cards my motherboard has integrated 7.1 surround...and i only use stereo sound (and on top of that i only have one speaker attached to it)

Buttermaker

on Jan 14, 2007

So now my brand new Asus MB is obsolete now. When will it end? Why would a PCI express sound card be better than a regular PCI card? They will sound exactly the same!! Anything to make people run out and buy more useless crap for their computer I guess.

Excalpius

on Jan 14, 2007

My gaming rig/main maching has an x-fi (because there is no other choice), but every one of the other dozen machines I own has a turtle beach sound board or on-board audio. And not a single client or friend/family of mine has bought a creative product since the Windows 2000 driver debacle. They have sucked for a very, very long time.

sixshot

on Jan 14, 2007

Well unless the primary hardware components are different, they shouldn't sound any different than their PCI-based counterpart. However, using PCI Express is beneficial in many ways. For starters, you only need 1x for audio data and that should provide enough bandwidth to accommodate any audio task: effects, pitch manipulation, high fidelity audio recording, multi-audio channel recording, stream processing, and so forth. It opens up the possibility of being able to do more while not eating up the PCI Express bandwidth due to how it is designed (serial vs parallel, switched vs bridge). Performance with a PCI Express audio card would be either on par or even superior given that not only do you offload audio processing from the CPU but also make accessing and using the audio hardware faster and more responsive.

Today's audio cards are still current-gen. If you don't care much for sound or if you have bad hearing, then an onboard sound device will suit you just fine. But there are those who needed some more, or have better ears. And for that, the de-facto standard is CL's audio cards and the only interface available is PCI. As I said before, I'm all for progress. But this is long overdue and PCI Express x1 slots are still nothing more than wasted space.

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