Notebook Sound Cards

Has anyone found a good non intergrated notebook soundcard that I can use for oblivion? I have heard of the Sound Blaster X-Fi notebook card. Is it worth it? Does anyone have a better suggestion. Thank you for your help.
cheers

 

I'm sure it would be worth it if you shelled out like $6500 for that BlackHawk XR5 and you are basically an "audiophile". You would be able to hook up 5.1/7.1 speakers or headphones but it obviously won't work with your built in speakers though.

-J.B.

 

The Creative X-Fi is indeed an excellent external sound card.

 

X-Fi doesn't have any of the real upgraded features the desktop versions do though that made them improvements over the Audigy line...

I'm looking into a Turtle Beach external USB card, far more features than the X-Fi. Also, the X-Fi is extremely overpriced, you have to pay $35 extra for the 5.1 adapter which was included with my PCMCIA Audigy 2 ZS.

 

I have both USB Xmod and pcmcia audigy 2 ZS. I can tell u that the Xmod is completely waste of money (although I only paid $40 from amazon)
Audigy, on the other hand, excellent!!

 

Well I am stuck here with a USB 1.1 sound blaster external USB...-.-'' works fine with my 4 point system...I am happy But i'd definitly recommend something else...maybe the Audigy NX USB? Thats USB 2.0 and is much better.

 

I had alot of problems with the 2ZS and Oblivion, to this day I remove it to play. But supposedly that's a compatability issue with the internal PCI controller conflicts (similar to IRQ conflisct but a little different). The XFi doesn't have this issue, but it did make me realize creative's gaming support sucks, figured it out with others at ElderScrolls, and still no fix from Creative.

When it works it sounds good, but the issue always crops up either a few seconds into the game or sometimes many minutes or an hour into it. It gets worse around torches and Oblivion gates it sounds like the audio is being pumped through a Kazoo. The annoying part is disabling hardware acceleration in the ini file doesn't help.

And creative's answer to this day, uninstall all drivers including the ones for the sound device intergrated on your laptop (and any other peripheral that 'might conflict') and then install their barebones drivers (no features like crystalizer, etc). This doesn't fix the problem but it sure does create alot of other ones, especially if you have audio over HDMI like the HD2K laptops.

Anywho with the XFi it's running of the Expresscard slot and one thing about PCIe is much reduced conflict issues. Supposedly this issue doesn't affect the XFi.

The biggest nuissance is that under Vista there's little hope for true acceleration since it all has to be translated through OpenAL instead of direct access through the HAL.

This review shows a tiny boost in max FPS under Oblivion;
http://www.tabletpcreview.com/default.asp?newsID=909

but notice min fps isn't really changed, so I wonder how much is truly possitive acceleration and how much is simply the path the reviewer took (they used Fraps not a preset path).

Anywhoo, it's a workable choice, but considering the limitation of the the effects in Oblivion, the intel HD may give you good enough audio. I know the Realtek on this Fujitsu is noticeably better than the Connexant on the Gateway and similar to the Audigy 2ZS IMO.

I'd say try your intergrated solution first it's a pretty solid codec, I doubt the XFi adds much to that, and the turtlebeach while nice will definitely add nothing to the processing itself and add CPU overhead. You may get slightly better sounds in music from those other solutions, but not in games. The only way to get any game benefits IMO is to drop down to XP and even then Oblivion doesn't offer much compared to other games with more immersive EAX 4.0 options.

 

Thanks everyone for your input, and thank you G****Ape for the very detailed info. Would give you a rep point if I could!
cheers

 

What are the benefits of having a good sound card?

And what are these Oblivion problems that I have been hearing about? I'm worried that Oblivion may somehow damage my sound card, but it seems to work fine at the moment.

Also I hear that in the future, multi-core CPUs will be used for sound effects instead of sound cards.

 

No Problem Go2, pay it forward man, help someone else out in the future, eh!