by David Pickett

Created on: August 22, 2008

The sound card. Many people often overlook a sound card. This is because now, in 2008, every computer motherboard has onboard sound. This saves you a PCI or PCI-E slot and the need to buy a sound card. However, onboard sound is often poor quality. You can easily add a sound card on most computer's built in the last 6 years or so. This guide will tell you what to look for and explain what you might need.

Firstly, the slot type. Inside that tower looking thing near your monitor is a motherboard, a central hub where the computer is controlled from. Other devices such as Graphics Cards, Sound Cards, Hard Disks, Processors and RAID controller cards all attach to the motherboard and the motherboard acts as a diplomat between you and your computer components. Different motherboards have different slots and sound cards can be brought with different slot types. The two main ones are PCI and PCI-E x1 slots. You can also purchase USB sound cards if space and airflow inside your computer is a problem. The card itself will plug into one of these slots. You need to check which of these slots your motherboard has and more importantly which are available as some components, mainly Graphics Cards, block access to other slots.

Once you have sorted out what slot you are going to use you can look at connections. The size of the sound card often dictates how many connections and of what kind it will have. This is the same with price. For example a cheap OEM 15 sound card has 1xAux Audio in 2xLine Out and 1xMic In. Don't worry if that looks confusing, basically the Mic In slot is for a microphone, the Line Out slots are for speakers and the Aux Audio input is for connecting other devices.

The next point is price. The card described above is the Creative Sound Blaster Audigy SE 7.1 OEM, it uses a PCI slot and offers a great upgrade over on-board sound, even at this price. That card and those like it are perfect for people who want better sound out of their PC in games and music without spending the earth. Cards above 30 or 40 will have S/PDIF outputs which allow you to connect to a home cinema system, these are useful if your computer is your main source of enterainment and you have a speaker system with a digital decoder.
However, if you produce music or just want the best sound available expect to pay for it. For 220 about you can pick up a professional sound card with amazing features. These cards have possibly 10 Line Outs, Mic In/Line In, HDMI connectors for watching HD content and more. These cards will offer exceptional performance but for the average music and game player are overkill. Avoid expensive cards unless you really need the connections or features they offer.

Finally, there is game processing. If you don't play games skip this bit. EAX is the sound system supported by quite a few games and offers a real sounding environment while playing. There are different versions and most low cost sound cards can use EAX 3.0, this is fine for most gamers although some may want the added extras of EAX 4.0 and 5.0. EAX does offer a good boost in realism to sounds but it can be costly to get a card with the latest EAX 5.0 support.

All in all it is very important to look at all these points and decide on what you need before looking at price as simply buying the best value card or the card nearest to your budget is pointless if it doesn't provide what you need or provides overkill for your uses.

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