Windows Gaming Peformance

With the USB Audio Device connected to the PC, I was curious to see if it would create any noticable decline in gaming performance from using a dedicated sound card such as Creative's X-Fi series. In order to test this, I plan to test using Unreal Tournament 2004 and Unreal Tournament 3. Unreal Tournament 2004 is a much older game these days, but we may still be able to discover some performance drops while running a botmatch demo. Finally, Unreal Tournament 3 takes the latest hardware to get a smooth framerate while running everything on high. How will the 5.1 audio affect this performance?

The Rig

• Intel Q6600 Quad-Core CPU @ 2.4GHz
• Gigabyte GA-P31-DS3L Motherboard
• 2GB DDR2-800 Crucial Ballistix Tracer RAM
• BFG GeForce 8800GTX
• 36GB 10,000RPM Western Digital Raptor SATA Drive

I'm not sure we'll see any dramatic effects on gaming with a quad-core processor, but we can never be sure without some benchmarks.