Audigy I or NForce onboard sound?

[SirCanealot]

Hi, all.
I recently got a new motherboard: a Gigabyte GA-K8NF-9 with an N-Force4 Chipset.

I currently have a Creative Audigy 1 set up to 5.1 speakers. However, I've heard the NForce's sound is "good"(same chipset as used in the XBox)... but, how good? ^^
Overall, in terms of pure sound quality and how well it's going to work with the latest games, what's the better pick?

Thanks, all :)

[auenf]

if you output your sound over speedif to a DD decoder, then nforce APU is the only way to go because:

neither card can send more than 2 channels of PCM audio over the speedif, the nforce has DICE (Dolby Interactive Content Encoding) which allows it to compress and send up to 6ch of AC3, whereas the creative can only send DD in 'passthru' mode.

apart from that feature, they have mostly the same game support, and the sound quality of the onboard nforce will depend on which ac97 codec is on there.

Enf...

[techz]

Onboard always uses more system resources, I never use Audio or Video onboard, unless its a cheapie system for browsing or word processing.

I use an Audigy 1 on my main pc, and its great, Creative are horrible at making a decent driver page unlike nvidia though, but their card rocks.

[kolak]

The Nvidia onboard cards from begining up to now have many bugs in drivers. If you use computer to play games you should buy Audigy or even SBLive. NForce's chipset offer good sound quality but you'll have problems in games.
I heard that they are as good as Audigy2, but for me that isn't true.
I listened both of them connected to Logitech Z680 speakers. I use Creative sample DVD-Audio disc and Audigy 2 clearlly won.