Sound Card or Audio Interface?

[Bumblebeebs]

Hi, when I use my Asrock Z97 Extreme4 mobo's onboard audio hooked up to my studio monitors, I get noise when doing GPU intensive tasks like video games. When I'm in my DAW the noise is much less. I found my brother's old M-Audio Fasttrack Pro, hooked it up to my PC and now there is no noise. So, I was wondering if there would be a decrease in audio quality in comparison to my onboard considering this products age.

 

[mamasan2000]

Music cards tend to have much better quality, in terms of hertz (range) and latency. Cause they have to.
Built-in is the cheapest chit. And as you've noticed, suffers from interference.

 

[VengfulMuffin]

It should not be a decrease in the audio quality, but rather an increase in electro-magnetic interference. This interference is produced by everything in your system, and using an external audio interface get rid of that problem. Also interference is dramatically increased when using the audio jack on your case, since there is a cable that runs through your case picking more interference and vibration noise. I would highly recommend an external audio interface over on board audio.

 

[Bumblebeebs]

Supposedly the onboard audio on this Asrock mobo is pretty good from what I've heard, but the noise that comes to my monitors is pretty annoying. I'm not noticing really any difference in sound quality between the two, so I'll probably stick to using the audio interface since it doesn't pick up any interference.