Should I Disable The Onboard Sound?

[ramprat 8]

Greetings fellow pilots,I recently added a Sound Blaster Audigy SE sound card to my Vista 64 machine. My question is regarding the onboard sound. Should I disable it in the bios? Thanks for any help.Bill

[Avcomware 1]

Hi, Bill.Yes, you need / must disable the On mother board sound in BIOS, otherwise you will get a contention and neither one will work right, or you may not get anything out. Depending on your OS +Mobo you may be better off with the On board sound, Vista has some issues with the Sound Drivers, see what works best for you? TV

[McCrash 3]

Greetings fellow pilots,I recently added a Sound Blaster Audigy SE sound card to my Vista 64 machine. My question is regarding the onboard sound. Should I disable it in the bios? Thanks for any help.Bill

Yes!

[Guest JimBrown]

No!I mean, not necessarily.With properly installed drivers, you should not get any "contention". In the Control Panel, you can set one audio system as the default. (I'd suggest the sound card.)If you have a headset, plug it in to the on board sound plugs. Then, in FSX, you can select to have ATC audio sent to the headset, and the rest of the sound sent to the speakers.I do that here, and it works great. Sounds good too. :( Since you are using Vista 64, I'm assuming that you have a pretty modern motherboard. You might want to try disabling the on board sound and see if it makes any difference to FSX performance, but I'll bet it makes very little difference.Regards,...jim

[Guest Alphahawk3]

Greetings fellow pilots,I recently added a Sound Blaster Audigy SE sound card to my Vista 64 machine. My question is regarding the onboard sound. Should I disable it in the bios? Thanks for any help.Bill

I am going through the same thing right now only with XP. I have been advised to install a sound card and that is that. I thought since I had a new M/B...Asus P6 Deluxe....that the on-board sound was OK...that a lot of improvements had been made from the on-board sound a few years ago. My problem is that I sometimes get popping and crackling when flying...and sometimes with the popping and crackling I get some stutters. It does not always happen. After doing a lot of Goggle searches on the sbuject....on-board vs dedicated sound card....I found an article that was dated 2008 and it said that with on-board sound every time a game using direct x or any 3d game accessed the HDD you could get a popping and or crackling sound and maybe some stutters in the game....it did not mention FSX. The article said that the on-board sound would use CPU cycles way more than a dedicated sound card. I have a 3 year old Sound Blaster that I will put in tomorrow and see if it cures my problem. Have been putting it off but since I have been advised on another forum to go to a dedicated sound card and then seeing your post I decided to do more research and so now I will get off my rear and put the card in...and yes you must disable the on-board in the bios. I went through that on my last rig. There can be driver issue there. I have read about using the voice with the on-board and the other sounds with the dedicated card but that would still leave me with my problem. Will post back and let you know if it cured my problem. Regards

[ramprat 8]

Thank you all,I appreciate your feedback. I will experiment a bit and see what happens.Best regards,Bill

[Guest Alphahawk3]

Thank you all,I appreciate your feedback. I will experiment a bit and see what happens.Best regards,Bill

Well I put in my old SB Live 24 and it solved my noise popping and crackling...of course my sound is no where near as good as what was on the M/B but obviously the Asus P6T Deluxe does not have that good of a set up of on-board sound...though I have to admit when there was no popping and crackling I could hear very creak and groan in the aircaft...quite a difference with the on-board and a 5 year old SB Live...of course if the on-board is causing other problems now I need a new sound card...big money pit this sim.

[Avcomware 1]

Hi Alphahawk.What OS and Sound Codec do you have?When you hear the "noise popping and crackling" did you try to go in the Menu and set your Sound to different Quality, maybe a lower quality will work better? Another thing to try is in Dxdiag set your Acceleration to Low or Medium, something other than what you have now. Try these before you buy another Sound card, some of the later on board Sound are better than the older external. TV

[Guest Alphahawk3]

Hi Alphahawk.What OS and Sound Codec do you have?When you hear the "noise popping and crackling" did you try to go in the Menu and set your Sound to different Quality, maybe a lower quality will work better? Another thing to try is in Dxdiag set your Acceleration to Low or Medium, something other than what you have now. Try these before you buy another Sound card, some of the later on board Sound are better than the older external. TV

I am using XP and the codec is ADI AD 2000B High Definition Audio from SoundMax. I never thought of trying to set the sound quality to a different setting as I am sure that even though I am only using a set of 2.1 Bose I did have it set on high....and it really did sound good when it was not noisy. I will give it a try as it will use less CPU....Thanks..will let you know if this works.

[Guest Alphahawk3]

I am using XP and the codec is ADI AD 2000B High Definition Audio from SoundMax. I never thought of trying to set the sound quality to a different setting as I am sure that even though I am only using a set of 2.1 Bose I did have it set on high....and it really did sound good when it was not noisy. I will give it a try as it will use less CPU....Thanks..will let you know if this works.

Update...I changed sound quality to one level lower and it works...you saved me some money..thanks. I now can also use my headset with the old Sound Balster card for VA or multiplayer just for voice. Thanks a lot. Regards

[sargeski 16]

Hi, Bill.Yes, you need / must disable the On mother board sound in BIOS, otherwise you will get a contention and neither one will work right, or you may not get anything out. Depending on your OS +Mobo you may be better off with the On board sound, Vista has some issues with the Sound Drivers, see what works best for you? TV

This is incorrect and pure misinformation. We are not talking about using DOS, Win95, or Win98 we are talking about using Vista.Both sound devices can coexist and function properly. I have my onboard audio enabled and a Sounblaster X-Fi installed and they both work perfectly fine. In fact multiple sound devices allow for a much more realistic experience within FSX. I prefer to process my normal sounds through my X-Fi and external speakers and all voice communications are handled via the onboard audio piped into my headset. Nice increase to the immersion factor!!Multiple sound devices will work under Vista and XP with no issues (provided you have drivers for your OS).

[Avcomware 1]

Hi, sagersky and everyone.You seem to have a superficial understanding of what Vista / an OS does when it comes to sound interface / production.This is a bit off topic, but it may be useful to promote a better understanding of what is going on inside a Computer / Sound interface.Vista does Not create / control the sound production, it just provides access to the Driver / BIOS vectors and it provides it to an application, or in the case of Vista it will limit it in some cases, like some of the 3D sound effects, beyond the scope of this discussion.The reason I, and most board manufacturers, recommend disabling the On board sound, It's because of possibility of contention, depending on how the Drivers / BIOS, Not the OS, and where and how the Memory / IO / IRQs are configured. It is less likely that someone will have a problem in this mode, as a matter of fact many of the BIOSs / MoBos will Automatically disable the On board when it senses an external board. We did that for good reasons that I will not go into, but suffice to say that Vista 64, in general, and Vista 64 Sound drivers in particular. Some limitations as mentioned above about Vista trying to limit certain options, are because of some agreement with some of the Hollywood degenerates that do not want people to have access to etc.To Sgersky: As far as DOS, W98 etc. you are also incorrect, I still have a MSDOS based system that has 3 Audio / Gameports cards in the same computer, it was Always possible, if you knew what you were doing. Vista does no better, if anything it's worse than XP when it comes to Sound access, as I mentioned, they will allow you to select One as a main output, and another Application may be able to get to the other hardware, IF the Drivers and the Application knows how to do it, Not Vista. Again, given the fact that Vista 64 Drivers are not very mature, I recommend that you disable the On board, if and when you install a second Sound card. TV

[sargeski 16]

Vista does no better, if anything it's worse than XP...

Avocomware,LOL.....Vista bashing again. LMAO...Vista x64 drivers are not mature???........I guess that explains why my system is so stable (with two audio devices enabled).I'll ask you as I did in post many moons ago, are you using Vista X64 for FSX??