May 28, 20179 yr I'm looking to upgrade my 6 year old Sandy Bridge-E system to a new system with a Kaby Lake i7-7700K CPU. I know the guidance for FS9 and FSX (and now P3D) with older systems was always to have a separate sound card to offload the overhead from the CPU. Is that still the guidance or doesn't it matter anymore with the newer and faster CPUs?
May 29, 20179 yr On-board sound is very good these days. Personally I've never had an issue with on-board sound. It's been quite a few years since I used a dedicated sound card. Asus MB's are particularly good in this respect. You don't say which board you contemplate, but my advice would be to use on-board sound as you can always buy a sound card later if required... I don't expect you to need to though.
May 29, 20179 yr I used to always use a sound card to save cycles on the CPU and provide good sound, but with this system, built many years ago, I tried the on-board Realtek sound set. With the Realtek graphic equalizer, I was able to shape the sounds and it sounded about the same as my old Soundblaster card. So, no more sound card to suck off of the PSU and with today's fast, multicore CPU's, it's not a huge drag on performance. My computer: ABS Gladiator Gaming PC featuring an Intel 10700F CPU, EVGA CLC-240 AIO cooler (dead fans replaced with Noctua fans), Asus Tuf Gaming B460M Plus motherboard, 16GB DDR4-3000 RAM, 1 TB NVMe SSD, EVGA RTX3070 FTW3 video card, dead EVGA 750 watt power supply replaced with Antec 900 watt PSU.
May 29, 20179 yr Don't forget the era of 100% CPU utilization hasn't existed for years. In those days we were lucky to have a GTX680 GPU and at 100% CPU utilization, if we could offload 4 CPU cycles with a dedicated soundcard, we did it. Today we are using 50% or less CPU utilization, maybe 75% in certain applications so a dedicated soundcard is not required for CPU offloading. I haven't used a dedicated SC for years. Now for sound quality, is a dedicated card required? No. Is there a noticeable difference between onboard and discrete? Most likely (depending on MB etc but most likely dedicated better). Do I need a discrete card? For non audiophiles flying with a gaming set of headphones listening to downloaded music, no. Audiophile or simply a person that wants the best of the best or certain features not available on integrated sound, yes, buy a dedicated card. Take the $200 US. that a good dedicated card would cost and put it into something that really matters like GPU, SSD, Memory or something. You will get much more bang for the buck. Regards,Gary Andersen HAF932 Advanced, ASUS Z690-P D4, i5-12600k @4.9,NH-C14S, 2x8GB DDR4 3600, RM850x PSU,Sata DVD, Samsung 860 EVO 1TB storage, W10-Pro on Intel 750 AIC 800GB PCI-Express,MSI RTX3070 LHR 8GB, AW2720HF, VS238, Card Reader, SMT750 UPS.
May 30, 20179 yr I agree with all the above. Haven't used a sound for years and, when I did experiment with my Asus sound card, the sound quality was no different to my ears, and neither did it improve my CPU performance one bit. Not even 1fps in flight sims or games. Windows 10 (x64) - X-Plane 11 - M/B: Asus ROG Maximus IX Hero - CPU: i7 7700k (@5.0GHz) - RAM: 32Gb Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR4 @ 3200MHz - Video: GTX1080ti - Cooling: Custom water loop (EK 140 Revo D5 pump/res combo, EK EVO CPU block, EK XE360 Rad)
May 31, 20179 yr Commercial Member IIRC, Windows 7 and above no longer support hardware acceleration of sound. I just pipe my sound from my video card to my stereo via HDMI. Cheers! Luke Luke Kolin I make simFDR, the most advanced flight data recorder for FSX, Prepar3D and X-Plane.
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