When is it worth buying a sound card for your PC?

Way back in the 80s and 90s, a dedicated sound card was essential for any PC gamer or musician. Your machine’s built-in hardware was limited to beeps and bloops, or at best a few convoluted tricks to fake low-res samples. Just having music and effects that didn’t irritate your ears was a major step forward. Back then, you wouldn’t consider doing without a sound card any more than you would today without a 3D graphics card.

As you’ve probably noticed, dedicated sound cards seem to have fallen off the radar. They still exist, but even the former king of PC audio, Creative, seems to have relegated them to the background. This may seem strange, given that, in some ways, sound matters more than ever. It is common for media to be mixed for spatial audio formats like Dolby Atmos, which position sound “objects” in 3D space. There is also a trend toward lossless audio in movies and music. Either of these can place serious demands on pipelines, as home theater owners will attest.

By staying outside, you might therefore be understandably confused. Does a sound card still significantly improve audio quality? Should you consider one when building or upgrading a PC rig? The quick answer is that most buyers can safely skip one, although there are cases where a separate audio interface is mandatory.

PC audio technology is no longer an afterthought, as it was in the ’80s. It stands to reason that anyone who unboxes a Windows PC – or a Mac or Linux machine, for that matter – will play music, games or videos almost immediately. This means integrating the hardware needed to process inputs, outputs and codecs. There are many ways to achieve this, but advances in chip size and chip design in general mean that what once required an entire board can be compressed into a single chip on your motherboard. If you’ve ever seen a mysterious reference to Realtek Audio in Windows Device Manager, that’s the kind of chip we’re talking about. There are other chip makers, but Realtek is surprisingly common in Windows PCs.

Sound cards were also vital for microphone inputs and 3.5mm speaker outputs, but not anymore. These were also integrated into motherboards and in many cases became useless. High-quality audio (including lossless) can easily be streamed via USB 3.x, DisplayPort, Wi-Fi or HDMI. When more compression and a little lag are acceptable, there’s Bluetooth. A 24-bit, 192kHz Dolby Atmos stream in lossless Dolby TrueHD only consumes about 18 Mbps, a fraction of the 5 Gbps bandwidth that USB 3.0 is capable of, let alone USB4 or Wi-Fi 7.

As if that weren’t enough, there are commercial and design incentives for removing audio hardware from your PC case. Number one is space. Laptops and handhelds obviously have little room to begin with, especially with endless competition to make devices thinner and lighter. In tower desktops, a large portion of the case may already be filled by a gigantic graphics card and its cooling systems. Any redundant card will only increase power consumption and restrict airflow.

For professional audio, the inside of a PC is also a relatively unfriendly place, since all surrounding components can potentially introduce signal interference. It is possible to provide sufficient shielding, as demonstrated by the continued sale of internal sound cards. But for optimal results and more convenient interfaces, it just makes sense to keep most professional audio equipment on your desk.

With most consumer audio solutions supported, the one area where sound cards reign supreme is professional audio interfaces. These configurations tend to support even higher fidelity than integrated chips, which may be necessary for mastering and production. And as we just noted, they allow for more convenient controls with less chance of interference. If you’re going to regularly connect mics, pedals, guitars, and keyboards to your PC, it would be ridiculous not to put these inputs and their buttons out in the open.

There’s one aspect of modern sound cards that professionals and media geeks can potentially benefit from: headphone amplification. Your motherboard may not have the power to handle high-impedance headphones, which provide extra precision for those who need it or simply benefit from it. And with an external add-on, you can potentially switch premium headphones from one device to another in seconds.

The bottom line is that if you’re just trying to listen to music or play games, there’s no real incentive to splurge on a sound card. With the right set of speakers or headphones, there’s usually nothing stopping you from getting spatial or lossless audio from your PC’s built-in equipment. Only wealthy purists or people who want to become the next Hans Zimmer or Aphex Twin should upgrade their technology.