Integrated Sound
The sound solution in the new NVIDIA chipsets is unfortunately their weak spot. Since NVIDIA replaced their own SoundStorm sound processor with a regular AC97 solution, the users have been complaining quite a lot about the sound quality provided by NVIDIA?s solutions. The launch of the nForce4 SLI (Intel Edition) hasn?t changed anything, because this chipset should again use the regular AC97 sound, which yields significantly to Intel High Definition Audio.
It is still too early to draw any final conclusions about the sound quality of the solution integrated into nForce4 SLI (Intel Edition), because it will depend on the implementation of the sound feature on each particular mainboard. Although we still can test how greatly the default sound solution of nForce4 SLI (Intel Edition) loads the system CPU:
The benchmark results suggest that AC97 sound of the new NVIDIA chipset uses more CPU resources than Intel High Definition Audio.
