AM5 (7800X3D) Motherboard with good on board audio recs?

I recently picked up the CPU/mobo/ram combo from microcenter that comes with basically a “good enough” mobo to be used for pure games. I found it to be severely lacking in terms of audio processing options and I see that a ton of these boards use realtek.

I upgraded from an ancient Asus Maximus VIII which used “Sonic Suite” that had decent amps and adjustments to an ASUS B650-E TUF Gaming. I need to use 3rd party software just to get my audio to levels close to what I was used to.

Is there a board out there that you guys vouch for with good onboard audio or am I better off with a different option like an external sound card?

I would be curious about this one myself when it comes upgrade time. A few years ago I looked around and could not find anything meaningful that gave me confidence. My own board was supposed to have ‘good’ audio, but it never felt as good as my Soundblaster AE-5 card. I hate Creative, but I have to admit that their cards (if you can get them to work) deliver really good audio. I cannot get the line out to work with 5.1 sound but I did find a solution to get the optical out to pass a 5.1 channel through my Logitech DTS setup with very good results.

Depending on your setup, I think getting either a cheap soundcard or halfway decent usb solution is probably going to deliver better results than onboard audio.

I remember long time ago, anything USB was considered to be the most jank way to improve audio, I guess the tech has come a long way?

How well does it handle electrical interference/line noise?

I feel like this question might be malformed. Anything usb would be taking your audio sending it digitally across usb, to the card at the end of the usb line then converting it to analog before sending it further.

Interference in the usb transmission or lnjection of line noise would result in corruption of the data being digitaly sent across usb wires.

Your up to the usb driver implementation if the sound card at the end and the computer do any sort of data confirmation and error correction of the digital bits upon completion of transmission. Note that usb has some rudimentary features to ensure data is sent and received correctly built in.

in other words the qualtiy of the audio is up to the sound card at the end of the usb wire, and how the driver handles sending audio digitally over usb.

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You can get significantly better sound from a computer by using an external DAC rather than trying to gauge which mobo has the best sound. It doesn’t have to cost an arm and a leg either.

The Asrock Taichi boards have an Ess sabre dac onboard.
The 600 series boards have the ESS SABRE 9218 DAC.
And the 870E series have the ESS SABRE 9219 DAC.

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What processing do needs to run and why are third party apps an issue? Capturing system audio to a DAW like Reaper or less expansive processor like Peace’s pretty common. If “levels close to what I was used to” is referring to levels in the usual sense of equalization and mixing that’s normally third party.

There’s very little measurement data but the hardware on most boards is probably fine for most playback tasks. Instrument and mic pres, minimum latency, dedicated DSP, and outputs besides 5.1/7.1+SPDIF are pretty much going be an external audio interface. If you need a native ASIO driver last I checked ESS and Realtek still weren’t doing that.

Yup. And what the OS does before the stream gets to the driver. Most impactful audio quality issue I hit is sample rate conversion between 44.1 and 48 which, being avoided by setting recording and playback devices to the same rate, has little to do with hardware, drivers, or third party software.

This is going to be controversial, but…

If sound really is a concern to you in 2024, as in, you cannot for any reason use the “of reasonable quality” crappy built in sound chipset of the motherboard, then just buy one of these, problem solved?

Of course, that is the cheap no-brand variant, maybe you would rather have the high end solution:

And, of course, there is also the universal solution here, just go wireless (in case your MB does not have wireless / bluetooth):

Someones I wonder if you really just post something for the sake posting more than anything else.

@Ambient
You need to clarify what you actually mean. As far as s/n and dynamic range goes most mid-range motherboards are decent however AMPs might be a bit on the weak side if you have for example high impedance headphones. What is your setup and what are you currently “missing”?

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