Sound cards vs On board

[woodchip]

I've been using sound cards right along but I'm wondering...how well does on board sound function. I guess I'm a bit affected by how bad they were way back when on board sound was introduced. In short should I buy another sound card or are they dinosaurs and on board sound is just fine?

[Krom]

These days there isn't much reason to go with a dedicated sound card, the onboard chips are more than sufficient to get the job done.

[woodchip]

And I take it they are not system hogs like some of the earlier card were? Thanks for input Krom.

[Krom]

Actually, they still work the same as the old "system hogs", but even the fancy sound cards you could get today work the same way more often than not. They all offload a lot of the work to the CPU through the driver, but that isn't a problem because the modern CPU is dozens or even hundreds of times faster at it; so it can get through that same amount of work without significantly impacting performance elsewhere anymore.

[Aggressor Prime]

Sound cards really don't provide much benefit these days except putting somewhat of a barrier between your analog signal and all the EM signals from your motherboard/video cards. Sound cards will provide slightly better sound, especially if they are shielded, but nothing beats an external DAC. If you are not too picky though, onboard sound should be more than fine these days, and some boards like ASUS' separate the analog signal from the rest of the motherboard.

[Krom]

Yeah, I avoid analog noise on the line by using the optical SPDIF that most motherboards supply to link up to an external decoder / amplifier. I've been running it that way for years and it always works perfectly. Most of the time I use PCM stereo mode, but when I need more channels the amp will decode ac3 (Dolby Digital) or DTS at up to 6.1 channels.

[Warlock]

Im with Krom. I with from my sb to my on board and I couldn't tell a difference.

Also 1 less heat generator.

[NamelessPFG]

I wouldn't even think of going back to integrated sound.

For starters, the Realtek ALC889A implementation on my motherboard (Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3P 2.0) is rather prone to hissing and whatnot through headphones. Clearly not a very good analog output at all. Newer motherboards may be better about that sort of thing, but any half-decent sound card won't have that problem.

Second, I still play quite a lot of DirectSound3D and OpenAL games. (Descent 3 uses the former.) A lot of them use EAX for reverb/chorus/occlusion/etc. effects, and versions 3/4/5 still remain exclusive to Creative hardware. Playing them without the hardware capable of such features means they go missing entirely, and then it's not as the game developer would have intended it to sound.

Third, as you might have noticed, I'm a headphone user. (Not cheap headphones, either-it's a Stax Lambda.) I use CMSS-3D Headphone to get binaural surround, and it works extremely well in DS3D and OAL titles. Sense of height, smooth panning, everything. It still works well enough in newer titles with software-processed audio (XAudio2 + X3DAudio, FMOD Ex), but then it's cut down to virtual 7.1. No height, sounds that seem to jump between arbitrary speaker locations, no true 3D sound. (You can tell I'm not happy about the state of PC gaming audio over the last 5 years. Maybe if Aureal wasn't eaten up by Creative, things would be different.)

Now, as to whether they're worth the cost for you? That's for you to decide. If you don't have good speakers or headphones yet, I'd suggest upgrading those first before going for a sound card.