onboard sound vs. stand alone sound card

Your money would be better sent. Probably. IMO.

What's the rest of your current rig?

Dont spend your money on a stand alone sound card, unless you are having problems (like electrical noise) or isnt satisfied with your sound.

The difference in sound quality is very small and you probably wont notice any big difference.

Cool. I figured that. Even though this is the sound card forum, anyone got any opinions on my processor conundrum? I really don't want to start another topic under the CPU forum.

I noticed that you mentioned you had a socket 939. I also noticed you said your X2 4400+ is 2Ghz and that you can upgrade to an X2 5600+. These are contradicting statements all around. First because the socket 939 X2 4400+ is 2.2Ghz with 1mb L2 per core and second, socket 939 only went up to an X2 4800+ OR the FX-60 (FX60 was 2.6 if I remember right). Either way you are going to have a very hard time finding either of these processors to upgrade to and in any case neither of them will be worth the money you are going to have to spend right now to get them.
If you truly have a socket 939 system right now (like me) you should wait and build new. Its still fast enough that its keeping up ok and unless you buy one of those 2.9Ghz chips OEM off newegg (along with some of this crazy cheap DDR2 and a new board for cheap) or somewhere else I don't think it would be worth the money. With your ram it would be worth it to max out your ram to 4gb (socket 939) but keep in mind you must have a 64bit OS to do that. Save your money dude and wait for the next truly NEW architecture be it Nehalem which is around the corner or Griffin (laptop code name?) when/if it ever comes out.
Jtrumpet...the reason the explosion card from Auzentech does better is because of drivers...come on man we all know that creative's drivers suck in Vista because they don't support direct sound too well and in order to transform the eax calls into direct sound call it eats up cpu cycles.....blah blah blah...we've all heard it before. Did if occur to you that these websites make money off of pointing out that " old stuff is junk/slower and new stuff is better" despite that it is not always true? There is not one gaming card on the market right now that has native drivers for Vista AND full hardware acceleration....not one. So all of them will take up cpu cycles, how many is a question of drivers more than anything.

Reasons to get a sound card include:

- Processing power (more voices in games, better resampling of audio when necessary )

- Higher precision - audio accuracy: software can only emulate sound as processed by hardware (esp. valid for games and EAX)

- Typically higher quality components compared to onboard audio, often with extra shielding, for less noise and interference

- Longer support - motherboard manufacturers typically ditch driver development after a year or two and you are left with generic drivers. Sound card manufacturers offer support for years, at least in terms of drivers

- Better headphones support - better then with onboard audio. This one is hard to explain but belive me there is a difference I assume it has to do with power output and some level of crossfeed between L and R channels or something more sophisticated like CMSS-3D Headphones on my X-Fi sound card

http://www.amazon.com/AMD-Athlon-D [...] 273&sr=8-3

I found this on Amazon. Looks like it's socket 939 unless I'm misreading. Yeah, you're right. My processor was 2.2 gigahertz. Most likely I was going to just max out the ram, get an SLI, go to Vita home pro, and ride it out till a newer and better boards come around.

Kona, in my experience Creative's drivers for Vista64 have been great for the past 9+ months. I give them a lot of credit cleaning up their act, even if they were forced to do so kicking and screaming.

The Elite Pro I'm using works precisely as prescribed in Vista64. There's no reason for me to upgrade, and believe me, I tried to find some reasons.