which sound card...

[GT]

About to start setting up my upgrade... Which sound card is better (window's
noises and 4 speaker gaming)...

Onboard sound - ALC888 on ASRock 4CoreDual-VSTA with 1.5GB DDR333 + e6400.
or
PCI 'Voyetra' Turtle Beach (Santa Cruz ) sound card plugged into above
board.

Second question:
What sort of performance improvement would I see in windows or gaming by
upgrading from the above DDR333 to DDR2-667?

 

[kony]

About to start setting up my upgrade... Which sound card is better (window's
noises and 4 speaker gaming)...

Onboard sound - ALC888 on ASRock 4CoreDual-VSTA with 1.5GB DDR333 + e6400.
or
PCI 'Voyetra' Turtle Beach (Santa Cruz ) sound card plugged into above
board.

Windows sounds and gaming won't make it matter much, as
neither is particularly hi-fi so the benefit of the PCI
Voyetra card is mostly lost, and neither sound option has
hardware processing for 3D effects used in games so they
will both consume more CPU for that. If forced to choose
I'd always go with the PCI card unless it was the lowest low
end type of card that sells for $10 new.

Second question:
What sort of performance improvement would I see in windows or gaming by
upgrading from the above DDR333 to DDR2-667?

Depends on where your bottleneck is. Depends on how much
memory you have or would get to replace it. You didn't tell
us much about the system, most people find the video card
the primary bottleneck but DDR333 is a bit slower than
average memory for a newer system. Get some benchmark scores
and compare them to somebody else's in a gaming forum with
similar CPU and same type video card.

 

[DaveW]

MOST motherboards that use DDR RAM will NOT accept DDR2 RAM which has a
different number of pins and a different voltage requirement. (There are a
few exceptions of motherboards that can handle both with different RAM
sockets on the board.)

 

[GT]

MOST motherboards that use DDR RAM will NOT accept DDR2 RAM which has a
different number of pins and a different voltage requirement. (There are
a few exceptions of motherboards that can handle both with different RAM
sockets on the board.)

The board I have (as mentioned above) is one of those exceptions - it has 2
of each slots. They can't be used simultaneously, but I bought this board as
an upgrade stepping stone: New board + processor, keep AGP graphics for now,
then upgrade to PCI-e graphics and faster RAM one day.

However nothing is working at the moment anyway (not even my newsgroup
server), so this conversation is irrelevant at present!