re: PC Discussion - Gaming, Performance and Enthusiasts

Wait, so I don't know much about headsets (I've always used stereo headphones), but reading the amazon description:

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Sophisticated internal sound card works outside of the PC resulting in no risk of interference

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If this thing has its own built-in DAC, it's going to bypass your expensive sound card completely. And if the headset has any sort of analog mode to bypass the headphones internal DAC, it seems to me you're paying too much for the headset if you aren't going to use the DAC portion of it. So, at the very least, I'd recommend either nixing the sound card or getting a different pair of headphones.

quote:

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Do dac's actually offer better audio performance than sound cards or do they just offer the same level for less money?

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Watch this video: LINK

Long (20 minutes), but informative.

That's strange. It could be people using the amplification of the sound card, or bypassing the DAC. I'd need to look into it more to find out.

Watch that video, though.

OK, I see now. It has a separate external USB sound card that is kind of shitty, so that part would just be discarded and never used. It looks cheap anyway. So, without the external sound card, they are just normal high-end headphones (with a mic) that obviously will sound better with a good output device, whether it's a DAC/AMP stack or a sound card.

What I like about my DAC/Amp stack is that it does not color the audio at all -- no extra warmth, bass boost, etc. Straight conversion of the audio as the musician, singer, developer, director, etc. intended it to be. No idea what various sound cards do regarding that though, could be the same. I also like that it's outside the case. Amps and sound processors will get warm, so it's nice to not have that extra heat with the rest of my components. There's also the issue of potential noise/interference through the headphones since a sound card would be connected to your case and motherboard and either directly or indirectly touching everything in the PC, but I don't know if I'd hear the difference personally.

I've seen the headlines but what is the issue?

They should just drop the price to get rid of the trouble gpus

Wait so does this mean I should return the GTX 970's I just ordered before I do my build or is this a non-issue?

As in -- should I potentially opt for 1 GTX 980 (and potentially add another later) rather than trying to do 2-way SLI with the GTX 970's now?

Please read the Tech Report article: LINK

It's the best explanation out there. Here are the barebones cliffsnotes: The GTX 970 has 4GB of vram, but 0.5GB of it is a separate partition with less L2 cache. The 0.5GB partition is accessed only when games require more than 3.5GB of RAM. It will access and transfer textures in and out of that 0.5GB partition slower than the 3.5GB partition, but it's still significantly faster than accessing system memory via the PCIe bus.

NVIDIA engineers did not communicate this to their PR/marketing folks when sending out units to reviewers, so naturally the community is OUTRAGED.

All this means is that in addition to the extra CUDA cores in the GTX 980, it also has a higher effective memory bandwidth. Oh, and also, the GTX 980 is over $200 more.

What this doesn't mean, is that your 970 is buggy, or more underpowered than intended, or otherwise broken. Even at 4K resolution in vram-hogging games, the 970 is, at its lowest, 80-85% of the performance of a 980 for less than 60% of the price. And honestly, if you're planning for 4K gaming in the very near future, you'll want to wait for the R9-390X. AMD consistently has remained ahead of NVIDIA in memory bandwidth. AMD's wider memory bus often puts a larger performance disparity over the NVIDIA flagship at high resolutions...but not always. NVIDIA chips do have built-in efficiencies that make better use of a narrower bus. That's why you should buy video cards primarily based on their recorded real-world game performance at your intended resolution.

Now, if we start seeing full L2 cache 4GB 970s hit the market for the same price, that will be cause for serious outrage.

A headline on Google now the other day said AMD "confirmed" the 380X will have 3D HBM, but after reading a few articles just now, I'm seeing accompanying that rumor/announcement/whatever is that the 380X will be the flagship (aka, no 390X, at least not immediately, or in single-GPU form).

Regardless, if going 4K, I would get the flagship if you can afford it, whether it ends up being the 380X, or the rumors aren't true and it's the 390x. PC games have a nasty habit of catching up with hardware quickly.