linuxaudio.org

Spencer Russell wrote:

quoted text
> I have an oppurtunity to get a really good deal on an HP NC4400, and

> as I'm looking for a new laptop, I'm thinking of grabbing it. It's got

> 1.5 Gigs of RAM, an SATA 5400RPM hard drive, and a 2GHz Centrino Duo.

>

> Any experiences with this sound codec? It seems to be supported with

> the snd-intel-hda alsa module, but I can't find any info about

> performance.

>

> What distinguishes an "HD" sound card?

The HDA specification is the successor of the AC'97 specification.
While AC'97 codecs are extremely cheap chips whose theoretical digital

performance numbers have no relation to their actual analog quality,

HDA codecs are extremely cheap chips whose theoretical digital

performance numbers can be even higher, but still have no relation to

their actual analog quality.
> One of the reasons I've been looking to replace my current laptop is

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> that the sound card and video card seem to compete for control of

> whichever bus they're on, so I get lots of xruns with any latency less

> than about 60ms.

PCI I/O performance depends mostly on the chipset.  "Centrino" means it

has Intel which is thought to be the best in this regard.
What chipset did your old laptop have?
Regards,

Clemens