Asus’ Xonar DG and Xense sound cards

When building a new PC, today’s enthusiast faces numerous important questions. How many CPU cores do I need? Will a GeForce or a Radeon deliver the smoothest frame rates in the games I play the most? Can I afford a solid-state disk large enough to be useful as a system and applications drive? How quiet can I make the rig without sacrificing performance? Oh, and do I really need a sound card?

I bet you can tell where this is going.

Not too long ago, the answer to that last question would have been a unequivocal yes. There was a time when the “free” audio integrated on motherboards was almost universally horrendous. Early onboard sound implementations were plagued by poor-quality codecs and board-level interference that translated to lousy audio quality. They also lacked hardware acceleration for positional 3D audio, which was a big deal at the time.

Source: The Tech Report