Why would you need a sound card?

[tkline]

I remember when back in the day you absolutely had to have a sound card in your system.. but nowadays it seems like the on board sound is really all you need, especially on higher priced gaming motherboards. For me personally, I’m just using onboard audio and everything sounds great to me. Yet, there’s still a bunch of sound cards available, soundblaster is still around and there’s other brands too. Why would you want to add a sound card over onboard audio? Is it something that is really only going to be better if you connect it to a high end home theater system? If you do most of your gaming with headphones, would there be any benefit to having a sound card? Just curious...

 

[herrwizo]

It all depends on your speakers/headphones, and your intended use (some people don't game at all, and use soundcards to record or produce music). Higher end gear does benefit from addon soundcards, since they usually have less (or no) EMI, better opamps, specialised headphone amps for higher gain, more recording inputs, lower ASIO latency for audio recording... but for regular gamers, no - they are not needed at all, unless you feel that sound is lacking or that your headphones/speakers are not fully utilised up to their potential. And with latest motherboard codecs this is very rarely an issue.

 

[mcnumpty23]

as above

though we are seeing some high end boards now with replaceable/upgradeable opamps

high amp gain--mine has that and seems to auto detect what i plug in and set it accordingly

better emi shielding for the audio circuits

and other stuff previously only found on sound cards

so yes the market for separate sound cards is shrinking

but not every has a high end motherboard so still a decent sized market for sound cards yet