SoundCard Upgrade?

[JRO]

Hi I am an avid gamer, and I recently purchased Unreal Tournament 2003. By running some Benchmarks I figured out that I am getting about 45 FPS average with EAX OFF on my Creative Labs Sound Blaster Live Value card and only about 30 with EAX turned on. If I were to upgrade to one of the Audigy Cards with EAX 3 would I benefit by getting better framerates as well, or only better sound? I know that alot of the sound has to be processed by the CPU, but I thought the whole IDea of Hardware sound such as EAX was to take the Load off the CPU and do most of the processing on the sound card itself? My other option is to upgrade my CPU from a T-bird 1.4 GIG to an xp-2000 or something like that, but I would rather not upgrade the CPU right now, because just about everything else I do runs perfectly on this chip except I want to be able to run EAX on UT2003.

The following is a list of the rest of my computers specs.

ECS K7S5A
T-bird 1.4 gig
40 GIG Maxtor 7200 RPM HardDrive
Radeon 8500
512MB PC2100 DDR Memory
SBLIVE Value


thanks in advance.
JRO

 

[HouRman]

My assumption based from previous sound card upgrading is that you won't notice a big performance or sound quality jump. Sure it'll probably be there, but it also depends on the speakers you have whether you'll notice the SQ.

If was a serious gamer I'd make sure the FPS are as high as possible and I'd probably use some good headphones and turn off EAX.

 

[Brian48]

Go to the other thread about EAX and HW audio in UT2003. You're not going to see that too many benefits in terms of performance by just upgrading your sound card. Personally speaking, as long as you're not having any problems with your SBLive, I say stick with that and upgrade your CPU. It would cheaper and MUCH more effective if you where to grab an Athlon XP in the 16-1800 range, than to get a new "gaming" sound card.

 

[Brian48]

http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.cfm?catid=27&threadid=892125

 

[nortexoid]

if u're upgrading your cpu, don't bother going for a mere 1700+...might as well go 2200+ or wait a little until the 2400+s come down in price..cuz they o/c like a motha..

but i agree, just upgrade your cpu, not sound card.