Hi guys, I am using onboard sound card (ie sound card that builded in the mother board) and i found that it has a huge impact on the speed of my computer when 'sound' is enable in FS2004. However, could somebody tell me that if i go and buy a sound card (e.g. sound blaster), will my computer be faster when playing fs2004 with 'sound' enabled (i don't much care about the sound quality since my speaker isn't pro though).thanksben

Ben,Most top makers (PMDG, LDS) do NOT recommend one use onboard sound - period.Most will say you'll be better off getting a board, but I've also heard it said that soundwise, fs9 does not place that much of a demand on an otherwise reasonably powerful, well maintained system. I do not know which is true, but my experience with onboard sound has been good - performance is the same with sound on or off. No tell tale stuttering or pauses as .wavs are played/mixed. I run a lean system and regularly deep clean the crud.Having siad that I am sure there is benefit in abandoning virtually ANYTHING integrated, and do plan on a board sometime.regards,Markhttp://i14.photobucket.com/albums/a319/mar.../sup_banner.jpgXPHomeSP2/FS9.1/3.2HT/1024mb/X700pro256

There was a question about this recently over in the FS Hardware forum (search for Live! or "Creative Labs"). The basic truth is that FS 9 is not a complex audio engine game. It does not have 5.1 support and does not use 3d sound. This means you can pick up any board and have pretty much the same support.Only FS-X will have 3d-accelerated sound at which point it will be important to get a DX9c / DX10 audio card with 3d-acceleration if you wish to use the 5.1 surround-sound features. The only company making a hardware 3d sound accelerated board is Creative Labs with their X-Fi audio card. It can do 64 (on the lower-end) to 128 channels of hardware-accelerated sound.

On board sound does suck some RAM and CPU cycles. If using add-ons like Radar Contact and Active Sky (for enhanced clouds) users have posted that stutters have decreased.FS9 needs all the CPU cycles it can get since the motherboard CPU does a lot of the graphics rendering. If you can offload that part of sound and video rendering not requiring the main CPU you should see significant improvement as FS improves and definitely with complex add-ons that may run their own process threads.

hi guys, thanks for your answer. I usually run AS6 at the same time as FS2004, and may be as ronzie said, it is causing a degrade on my PC performance. However, I just removed my sound blaster live from my another 6 years old computer(which is not longer in use) and I will install in into my current PC and see is there any difference or not. Thank you very muchben