Can anyone recommend a 775 mobo with fairly good or even just plain good on board sound? If the mobo is less than £100 thats even better!
Pretty much all modern boards come with decent sound these days. But the current best are the Realtek ALC888 or 889a chipsets if i'm not mistaken.
Unless you need on board sound, you could just get a cheap soundblaster or something, that'll sound just fine.
Seconded for on-board sound, failing that the ADI 1988B HD chipset (commonly used by soundmax) is an ok onboard chipset, but not as versatile as the Realtek chipsets, also better support for the Realtek
I can't stand the SoundMax 1988B but Anandtech really bum it. I just think it sounds awful. 889a that's used on Gigabyte boards or 885 are the premium chipsets if you can find them. But tbh, a Creative PCI-E card is all of £25.
Asus bundles a lot of their motherboards with the Supreme FX [or something] sound card, based on a CMedia chipset. MSI also has a few motherboards that have integrated X-Fi chips on them, you'll have to Google for models.
CMedia aren't used in HD Audio anymore. Asus uses "CMedia" on its Xonar, but ADI on its SupremeFX. MSI stopped putting X-Fi on its boards in favour of including a PCI-E x1 card instead. It's bundled with most Diamonds.
