ok I havent gotten as far as finding out exactly what card it is, but when Im running music software, the program uses only about 23 % CPU usage so its not the processor. But when I play about 10 tracks with 4 effects each on them, the music starts to crackle, I KNOW I KNOW it does this when the CPU gets overloaded, been doing this 10 years I know lol. What I want to know is could a sound card suck? All my drivers are updated, I bought this pc about 4 weeks ago for 500$.