Difference between revisions of "CS4299"

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(ThinkPad's this chip may be found in)
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* Chipset: CS4299
 
* Chipset: CS4299
 
* Interface: AC'97 2.1
 
* Interface: AC'97 2.1
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=== Other Information ===
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This soundcard is cheap pile of absolute rubbish. The sound quality is poor. Worst of all, it is incapable of playing multiple PCM streams or hardware mixing. To get around this, you need to set up dmix in ALSA. This may sound simple, but it is not; there is very little documentation on the subject and there can be a multitude of other problems to overcome. Also, you will need to manually configure every application to use dmix, and all OSS-only applications will have to have their commands aliased (or similar) so that they use the aoss compatibility wrapper. If anyone can provide more information on the configuration of all this then please add it.
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Sorry about the bad news to any who owns a ThinkPad with one of these cards.
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If you are considering buying a ThinkPad with one of these then please take this into account when making your decision. I upgraded from a T20 to a T23 because of the T23's 16Mb graphics card and the dual USB ports. Had I known about this I wouldn't have bothered- the T20's sound card was excellent. If you are considering getting a T2x series ThinkPad it would probably be better to sacrifice the better graphics and the dual USB ports in favour of a decent sound card.
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Revision as of 22:40, 16 July 2005

CS4299

This is a Cirrus Logic AC'97 Audio controller

This chip is sometimes incorrectly called CS4229 in IBM documentation

Features

  • Chipset: CS4299
  • Interface: AC'97 2.1

Other Information

This soundcard is cheap pile of absolute rubbish. The sound quality is poor. Worst of all, it is incapable of playing multiple PCM streams or hardware mixing. To get around this, you need to set up dmix in ALSA. This may sound simple, but it is not; there is very little documentation on the subject and there can be a multitude of other problems to overcome. Also, you will need to manually configure every application to use dmix, and all OSS-only applications will have to have their commands aliased (or similar) so that they use the aoss compatibility wrapper. If anyone can provide more information on the configuration of all this then please add it. Sorry about the bad news to any who owns a ThinkPad with one of these cards. If you are considering buying a ThinkPad with one of these then please take this into account when making your decision. I upgraded from a T20 to a T23 because of the T23's 16Mb graphics card and the dual USB ports. Had I known about this I wouldn't have bothered- the T20's sound card was excellent. If you are considering getting a T2x series ThinkPad it would probably be better to sacrifice the better graphics and the dual USB ports in favour of a decent sound card.

Linux OSS driver

This sound chip is supported by the i810_audio kernel module.

Linux ALSA driver

This sound chip is supported by the snd-intel8x0 kernel module.

ThinkPad's this chip may be found in