Whatever you guys said, sound card is here to stay. Same like floppy, even though not many people use it (and been announced dead), there are some people still use it. And GPU will dead? Give me a break! No CPU can render as fast as a graphics card, no matter how fast and how great this integrated graphics or sound solution is, I still buy discrete sound and graphics card. Period

Putting everything onto motherboard isn't a good choice no matter how good the audio codec is. This is because a motherboard is like an electrical thunderstorm, it have lots of interference that can distort audio and makes cracking sound. And I don't want to buy a overcrowded motherboard with everything integrates on it

EDIT: My friend at college have Klipsch Promedia GMX 2.1 speaker and using onboard sound (don't know which one), and to my surprise it sound like crap! I dare to say if make a comparison between me and him which speaker will do the best, my speaker will do better in terms of voice and clarity (SB Live! 5.1 + Logitech X-230) . Yes that speaker (Klipsch) have a great bass (makes my head dizzy) but it sounded like it lacks something without a sound card, lacks depth

This proves (at least to me) that a great speaker is useless without a great sound card, and my friend agrees with me, he said that my speaker sound so much better even though the RM400+ price gap

This post has been edited by Najmods: Feb 9 2007, 08:53 AM

What you basically mean is with multi core CPU, so we don't need a graphics card to render the scene anymore? Don't make me laugh, no CPU can render as fast as a graphics card, period. Graphics development is far too fast compared to CPU. By the time CPU have 16 cores, I bet a graphics card have more than a thousand ALU's, more than a terabyte per second of memory bandwidth.

No matter how powerful the CPU is, theres a lot of disadvantages compared to discrete graphics card like memory bandwidth, look at current CPU vs GPU, CPU only have around 1.2GHz the fastest RAM with 128-bit memory bus while GPU have more than 2GHz of speeds with 256-bit memory bus (R580), and the latest 8800GTX have 384-bit while the upcoming R600 is rumored to have 512-bit memory bus. And to makes matter worse, current high end card is bottlenecked by the CPU, no matter how fast it can be!

About the sound, you just an average joe, you don't know any distortion or any anomalies on the sound itself between onboard and discrete sound card output. I don't blame you for that, it really depends on people, some people just fine with onboard sound and I don't