Hi, I have built a new superfast i7/Windows 7 system. I am currently using the onboard realtek audio, but I also have a Creative XFI soundblaster pci card that I chose not to enable just yet. Are soundcards now obsolete because onboard audio is just as good/better? I also had plenty of crashes on my old system, and wasn't sure if maybe the soundcard could have been a culprit. I heard of PMDG a/c having texture corruption/sound issues but I am not sure if its related to soundcards, onboard audio, or both. I just had a crash in the PMDG 747 on takeoff from imaginesim KATL on my way to KPHL, the screen froze, audio was corrupted with a loud deep beep sound. I followed Nickn's guide to w7/FSX installation and placed the vista uiautomationcore dll in the FSX folder. No tweaks to the FSX.cfg except for what NickN suggests, no bufferpool entry, and I am not using the BP=0 ******* tweaks. I'm trying to determine what the cause of the crash was, and also decide if I should stay with the motherboard audio or install the soundblaster card. Any suggestions? Thanks

If the motherboard sound is aok, then just stick with it. I have the Asus Rampage II Extreme and use it's Supreme mini card and the sound is outstanding.

I use my Asus P6T onboard sound, great, love it. :( No problems, sounds great.

I had the same question when I got the new machine, since I have always used SB cards. I was told the OB sound was better so I didnt even install the SB card and so far it's been fine, no issues with it at all.

I am of the school that anything you can do to remove extra work from being processed by the CPU while gaming helps improve preformance in games and audio processing is one of them. I haven't heard if FSX is multithreaded and able to use more than one core and as such, should show an increase in preformance with an add-in sound card. Want to be sure? As you already have the card installed (the way you state it not being enabled), run a test with FSX and run a benchmark test for FPS as can be found with FRAPS with onboard sound and with the SoundBlaster XFi enabled and see what the difference it makes. Once you compare the differences, use the one that offers better preformance.

Whiteknight, that is exactly what I was wondering as well. In the past soundcards were seen as important to have because they took the audio processing tasks away from the cpu, but from what I have heard now onboard audio is just as nice (at least sound quality wise) But I am still not sure if onboard audio has improved so much that they render discreet soundcards useless. I suspect that any performance impact between onboard vs the pci card is negligible, but I may try a fraps test in the future.

Nwer version sound card has thier own onboard DPI processors, which onloads the task from cpu when processing sound during game play. Depending on the load tour putting on the cpu during running FSX, onboard audio can intro stutters, because now the cpu has to process sound along with FSX threads. External pci card works for me because of the load I running on the cpu when playing FSX. But evetybody system is different.

I learned that the hard way about audio processing when a game called Ghost Recon came out. I would average 30+ FPS on most maps, but doing the mission at Vilnius where one had to escort tanks, the game would drop to single digit as in 2 FPS at the start when near the tanks which were idling. Once I got away from the tanks, my framerates came back up. I also had the same problem when lots of machine guns were fired, lots of sounds to be played. Adding in a sound card with it's own DSP solved that problem and my framerates jumped up to 60 and greater. Since then, I have built (or had built) with a sound card in it.

...but I may try a fraps test in the future.

Did you do a test yet?