Greetings all!For quite some time now I've been running FS9 on a rig with an ASUS P4B533 mobo, Pentium IV 2,4 Mhz, 1 Gig RAM, GeForce 6800 128 Mb, and an "onboard" soundchip on the mobo.Having been informed that onboard soundchips eat up a lot of CPU cycles and bring down the FPS considerably, today I acquired an USB Creative Soundblaster Audigy 2 NX external soundcard, which produces a quite impressive sound when the four Merlins of my favorite Lancaster or the four Griffons of my equally favorite Shackleton are growling away happily, but... the bloody thing brings the framerates down MORE than the onboard chip ever did! It's not that the onboard chip is still running "parallel", I duly disabled it in the BIOS. So it's the Soundblaster all by itself that seems to do it.I'm not overmuch upset because my rig can handle the drop without becoming unflyable, but I am very, VERY much surprised at this totally unexpected phenomenon. Could anybody give comment, wise advice, a funny joke or some helpful suggestions here, please? Be well!Jaap Verduijn.

I suspect its because you went w/ an external USB version.An internal PCI based A2 should yeild better performance.That being said, it may or may not provide better performance than your onboard sound. You'll have to try one out & see.

Hi Jaap, hows about using an airplane with only one Griffon? Hehe No, seriously, the only detail I could think of is you're using your USB ports in v.1.1 mode. AFAIK, you shouldn't connect USB2 and USB1.1 devices to the same port. Perhaps try to seperate them and check whether the all the bios settings for full USB2 speeds are enabled? Hope this helps, good luck and kind regards Jaap PS, of course it could be a standard 'feature' of external sound devices

Thanks guys, you've both given me some ideas to try figure it out. I'll keep experimenting, and if something pleasant occurs I'll report it here.Be well!Jaap Verduijn.