VIA P4X266 Motherboard Roundup - The Forbidden Five - January 2002

Onboard Sound Performance

Other than the Acorp 4VPX266A, none of the motherboards had any issues with their onboard sound in terms of audio quality. The remaining 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 will have to purchase a PCI sound card with those features.

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) Shuttle AV40/R Azza P4X2-AV VIA P4XB-SA ACorp 4VPX266A ECS P4VXAD 1.28 1.62 1.64 1.77 2.41

All of the boards exhibited CPU utilization of less than 3% on our 2GHz Pentium 4 system which was directly in line with what we'd expect. Now let's consult a real world test of the performance drop seen when enabling onboard audio:

Onboard Sound Performance Return to Castle Wolfenstein (% drop with sound on - lower is better) Shuttle AV40/R Azza P4X2-AV VIA P4XB-SA ACorp 4VPX266A ECS P4VXAD 10 10 11 11 12 | 0 | 2 | 5 | 7 | 10 | 12 | 14

Again we see that even in a real world test case, the performance drops are all virtually identical. Other than the audio problems we saw with the ALC100 codec on the Acorp board, all of the solutions seem to have decent AC'97 audio subsystems.