On Board Sound Chips Vs. Standalone Sound Blaster

A lot of newer motherboards now feature excellent-sounding on board sound chips.  I canvassed shops over the weekend and even saw a couple with built-in Creative X-Fi chips.  I’ve demoed some of these setups and they really sound great, better than my two year old Sound Blaster setup.  Does this spell the end for the Sound Blaster as we’ve  known it?

Personally, I do a lot of CPU-intensive work on my PC and as far as I can tell, on-board chips eat up processing power on your machine.  This means extra load that takes away from your regular processing tasks - like generating thousands of spam webpages in the background while you’re studying an excel spreadsheet, designing a logo on Photoshop and running a raunchy movie  all at the same time.

You’re basically dispensing horsepower to deliver top-notch quality sound.  Standalone cards, even when they’re two years old like mine, has its own dedicated digital sound processor to render its beautiful output.  Until I get a PC that can run 100 things at the same time and not lag, I think standalone cards are still the way to go.