Is it worth buying sound card nowadays? Or motherboards finally

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If your motherboard has optical out, a standalone DAC is the way to go. Pic related.

>>61182659
>3000$

Oh boy. Literally more expensive than my whole battlestation.

>>61182694
>battlestation
>>>/v/

It depends on what other audio equipment you're using. If you've just got some cheap headphones or computer speakers motherboard audio will be fine. However if you've got higher end or harder to power speakers or headphones you'll want to skip sound cards and go with some kind of dac, amp, and/or receiver.

Buy ODAC and a dedicated amp

Using Xonar DG with some hyperx cloud core headset, it's alright, only problem is that Asus is infamous for their drivers, but there are some community drivers available

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>>61182717
>placebo technology
>>>/trash/

Audiophiles should be deported to >>>/x/

>>61182935
Same. Uni Xonar drivers are great. I have Xonar DX installed and recently got a Creative card for free and I don't want to swap them solely because of drivers.

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Just get a USB DAC, less interference.

Fiio E10K is solid for $75 on Amazon, though you could spend more, or less

>>61182875
I'm using Hyperx Revolver and quality is amazing even with motherboard. So it makes me wonder how it would sound with a proper sound card.

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>mfw all those audiofiles

I get a lot of noise in my headphones when my video card ramps up. I'm thinking a usb dac would bypass this. Has anyone had this problem?

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Not really but it's not always about how clean the sound is.
Sometimes you buy one for the features that improve the way you like the audio to sound like.

Even built in sound chips like Realtek ALC1150 does well enough today, so the whole audio quality is moot at this point unless the one listening is an audio test device rather than a human person.

Funny thing is people invest in this meme soundcards and then have shitty plastic speakers anyway.

>>61182555
My motherboard doesn't have XLR out so it doesn't really matter for me

>>61182555
No.

It hasent been worth it since Vista unless your onboard broke for some reason.

The last soundcards that were worth it were worth it because of hardware acceleration which is no longer possible. CPU's are much much faster today and sound hardly taxes them at all, they don't need an extra processor to help with this.

Hardware acceleration was taken away because MS found a large chunk of bluescreens were caused by shitty creative sound card drivers.

>>61185835
Like who? Literally everybody who cares about sound cards is guaranteed to also be a headphone autist.

like me

Unless you need special features(like surround sound or something) the motherboard's sound chip is fine.

>>61186170
notice how I said speakers you degenerate NEET weeb austist?