Live / Audigy / x-fi remove stutter?

[ziddey]

I have a sblive value 4.1 kicking around and figure sound quality wise for powering a 2.1 system, it'd be more or less similar to what an audigy would give me so no real need to buy anything. But I can't remember if it'd help with a stutter issue I'm having. Like if I'm playing winamp and load up cs or something, it'll stutter for a split second while it's changing resolution. This is with onboard realtek hd sound at the moment. It really bugs me, so I'm looking for a way out. I've tried changing performance between foreground / background / services in the system properties but it doesn't help much. Anyone know?

[Modzilla]

check pci latency. sb cards need a clean pci bus. Other devices hogging the pci bus (with a high pci latency, relative to the sound card pci latency) can cause background noise and audio stuttering. Onboard sound? onboard sound requires more cpu cycles than a seperate sound card. when the cpu is busy with something else, like loading cs, it may drop the audio for a second. the fix for this is to install a seperate sound card and disable onboard audio in the motherboard bios. even the pci sb live 5.1 will be a noticeable improvement over onboard audio, in terms of cpu usage and stuttering.