Is A New Soundcard Worth It For My Setup?

wycliffslim

Honorable
Dec 19, 2012
4
0
10,510
Alright, so I do a lot of gaming and listening to music on my computer. At the moment, I use my pretty crappy Turtle Beach headset for my gaming and my V-Moda M100's for music. However, I just purchased a Sennheiser PC360 headset to replace my Turtle Beach's. So, my question is this.

Is it worth spending an extra $100+ on a sound card? I'm currently running from my motherboard by the way.

If you guys think this is the case, what would you recommend, keeping in mind that I do gaming and music(a lot of high quality loss-less recordings) all through headphones/headsets. I will not in the foreseeable future be hooking this up to a full speaker system so that's not a priority for me.

Thanks in advance for the help!
 
I've had a Creative Soundblaster X-fi Fatal1ty Extreme Pro Gamer card for about 5 years, and I don't regret it, but only b/c back then the mobo I had when I bought the card had terrible music quality, the bass was nearly non-existent, treble was rolled off, and no amount of equalization could fix it. However, with my much newer mobos, the sound has been much better, I would dare to say indistinguishable from my X-fi card. I doubt you'd notice a difference with a $100 card unless your mobo sounds really bad for some weird reason. Onboard audio has gotten so good, you may not notice the difference using headphones only, even the Sennheisers, unless your hearing is superb or you have a trained ear. I'm listening to my Senns right now on my X-fi and video card's HDMI audio sounds just as good, even better when watching movies since it outputs DTS HD Master and Dolby TrueHD lossless formats . If you can't resist, or are curious, I'd go with a decent asynchronous USB DAC/headphone amp, like the Schiit Modi and Magni DAC/AMP stack. The stack is $200 if you can spare the extra $$. USB DACs generally work with no additional drivers, and are easier to disconnect and return if you don't want it, vs pulling your rig out to install a sound card, install software, drivers, etc. Unless you get some really high impedance (hard to drive) headphones, just stick to the onboard audio if it sounds good enough.