Dedicated PCI cards = less CPU usage?

Originally Posted by Dayvon

You are dead on about the PCI soundcards. Although it is cheaper and more affordable to use on-board (Motherboard) sound, it is more CPU tasking than the alternative.

It depends, actually. The nForce2 onboard-soundchip, "Soundstorm" in fact had lower CPU usage than the best PCI cards at that time, including the entire range of Creative Audigy cards. It also featured Dolby Digital 5.1 realtime hardware encoding for the first time ever on a PC platform.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Soundstorm is not the only exception, though. The new HDA standard also introduces very low CPU usage for sound processing, lower than many PCI solutions on the market. Besides, you will not notice the difference in speed between 5% CPU usage for onboard sound (worst) and 3% CPU usage for PCI (best) on a fairly modern system.

Some onboard NICs also come with a dedicated chip, most notably the Marvell Yukon series (Gigabit), using virtually no CPU time, while I've seen budget PCI cards (especially Netgear) use up to 10% and spiking like crazy under heavy traffic.

The statement that PCI cards generally have lower CPU usage than their onboard competitors does not apply anymore.

There's nowhere I can't reach.