Disabling sound in BIOS

[da233]

I've been using a PCI Audigy sound card for years now and until now, I never realized that my onboard sound was still on in the BIOS. I'd always assumed that installing the pci sound card would disable the onboard automatically.

Would I possibly see some kind of performance improvement in games by turning this off, even if very very minimal? I know that onboard sound does utilize the cpu... the question is, does it utilize sound even if a pci card is in use?

 

[engiNURD]

If nothing is getting sent to the onboard sound, then it won't use ANY CPU cycles, even if its enabled. No need to disable it in the BIOS if nothing is configured to go through it.

 

[Christopher]

It might make a (very) small change in boot times because it won't have to load a driver for it and initialize the hardware, but you shouldn't see any change once the system is up and running.

That being said, I usually disable the onboard stuff I'm not using to make Windows installs as simple as possible.

 

[Basheron]

Just turn it off...it's all CPU powered, not that you'll notice anything but its a theoretical performance boost.