The State of Motherboard Audio

ExtremeTech examines the advancements being made in integrated audio with a look at five current solutions including NVIDIA’s nForce2 MCP - singled out for it’s processing horsepower, feature set and future potential:

Today, CPUs have plenty of cycles looking for something useful to do, and thanks to improvements in both codec designs and motherboard layouts, motherboard audio can be implemented in a way that even enthusiasts might consider using. Unfortunately, despite strong performance and good signal quality, a poor motherboard layout can doom an audio processor to mediocrity, or worse… nVidia’s nForce2 chipset features the MCP-T audio processor, the only solution we’ve seen with a DSP core (it actually has three). This audio processor powers the Xbox, and has the unique ability to encode any audio stream into Dolby Digital 5.1 in real time – an enticing feature all by itself. The baseline MCP chip supports only basic two-channel AC97 audio services, whereas the MCP-T comes with all the bells and whistles.

The State of Motherboard Audio @ ExtremeTech