Realtek or nVidia sound drivers?

[danhasmail]

Hi,
I'm doing a complete reinstall of win 7 64bit on this ASUS Rampage 3 Extreme and i see that the Asus CD installs Realtek sound drivers and the CD from my MSI 470 video card also installs nVidia sound drivers. They both show up in Device manager under Sound: 4 lines say nVida and 1 line says Realtek, also there's 1 line that says Microsoft HD Audio device and 1 line says Ultravision which is my mic. My question here is....which is better?? They don't show any conflicts. And how do i know which one my music is using?? Any info on this is greatly appreciated. Live long and prosper. danny

 

[BadBigBen]

Danny,

the nVidia audio, is the build in sound of the graphics card...

the RealTek audio, is the audio codec build onto your mainboard...

the Microsoft HD audio, is a filter driver, allowing the HD (high definition) audio to be used on the RealTek or nVidia card...

which is better, or better yet what are they used for:

the RealTek, obviously it is used for driving audio devices attached to the mainboard, this would include your PC speakers and most likely it is the one that you are hearing music from...

the nVidia, is mostly used to tranfer sound over a HDMI cable to a TV...

the MS HD, as mentioned above, is really just passing the sound further down the road to either the RealTek or nVidia...

hope this helped clear up a few misunderstandings you had...

Ben
"If it works don't fix it! If it doesn't use a sledgehammer..."
How to ask a question, when posting them to a professional forum.
Only ask questions with yes/no answers if you want "yes" or "no"

 

[rclarke250]

Ben is correct, if you have your speakers or headset, going to the motherboard audio ports, then the realtek is driving them, if you have hdmi from the video card, you can get audio from the card without having to run a cable from the audio card or motherboard to the card internally as it can decode audio for you. this is pretty new for nvidia, but ati/amd has been doing it for years.

 

[paparazi]

Personally I wouldn't be installing anything off the discs as they will be all out of date and superseeded by several newer drivers.
You could go on to the Asus website or better still (if you know exactly what chipsets they are driving) go to the chipset manufactures website and download theirs...they will be the latest available.
As Windows 7 would have been pretty new (especially the 64bit version) there will have been substantial improvements with the drivers.

Martin

On wings like angels whispers sweet
my heart it feels a broken beat
Touched soul and hurt lay wounded deep
Brown eyes are lost afar and sleep