Hi All, I am curious to know how many people here have a sound card set up in their pc as opposed to using just the onboard sound. For someone like myself who is not a technofile and is tone deaf, what are the advantages of a sound card? Cheers
None. Back in the days onboard sound was mediocre at best, not great SNR (signal to noise ratio) and DAC (digital to analog converter), bad game support, higher CPU usage. Creative had EAX and other fancy stuff. Today most games use in-engine sound processing to create sound effects for stereo/multi-channel audio and not some proprietary technology like EAX. (Or use an open standard like OpenAL) Nowadays onboard chips have high SNR and good DAC's. Dedicated cards can be better based on the used components, cheap cards most likely use the same chips as onboard audio. Asus makes some nice cards if you fancy some lower SNR. I have a pro-audio interface hooked up but it has a total different purpose: recording, low latency, yes the DACs are very good, but for gaming and general use, can't tell the difference.
Interesting stuff, most of it i don't understand, lol. Do you need to use a sound card for buttkickers?
No I don't. But from what I understand buttkickers use the LFE out (subwoofer) and sends that to the buttkicker. Or use a dedicated card and use all outs to hook up multiple buttkickers. Sound quality is not important here. So depending on you needs you need to choose the card.
As you can see in my signature, I use a dedicated sound card (ASUS Xonar DGX), but for only one reason: I have an ancient 5.1 sound system and my motherboard's integrated audio doesn't support it properly. In terms of audio quality, I don't think there's any difference, nowadays integrated chips are good enough for generic usage.
There are two more advantages: if you use headphones, onboard audio might not provide enough volume (depends on headphones). Dedicated card might have headphone amplifier, which provides more power (volume). Second, in my experience separate PCI/PCIE card is less likely to pop/skip during music playback under heavy CPU load, but this second part I've no objective evidence to prove etc, so it almost negligible and might be caused by driver issues rather than built in vs external card.
I very recently got a set of wireless Artemis headphones and run them at 70% that is plenty loud enough for me. It would seem that onboard sound has come a long way then.