I was just wondering what is the difference in sound quality between onboard sound and a cheap sound card? Specifically my mobo (Epox 4SDA5+) has Realtek ALC650 6-channel full-duplex integrated sound My friend has a Creative SoundBlaster Live! 5.1 lying around and I was wondering is there any features or improved quality that I would get by using the sound card over built in sound? I only use the audio for listening to music (mp3's) and gaming (like Battlefield 2, Half Life 2, etc), nothing fancy.

Read the specs on your On-board sound. Might be 5.1 as well. What is 6 Channel? I dont think you will find any difference in the sound quality. <===Lefty===

lefty2053 - "What is 6 Channel?" 6 Channel speaker output is 5.1 surround sound. It's the 4 front and rear speakers with the center ,5, and then the sub which makes it 6. As for your on-board or soundcard, I do agree with lefty2053, it all depends, you'll have to compaire. Open a browser with the SoundBlaster Live! 5.1 specs then in another browser, open the specs on your motherboard sound. See what's better. For features, I owned the SBlive! 5.1 also and I liked the features more then the onboard I have now with my new modo. I did loose features but it's none I was going to use much anyways and the sound on this mobo is nice also. I'm not complaining. Sound features aren't very important to me. Abit AN8 Socket 939 AMD64 3000+ -1.8Ghz Corsair 1Gig 2x512 Seagate 160Gig SATA MSI Radeon x800 PCI-E Antec TrueControle 2.0 550 Watts

One thing to consider is there is a greater CPU load with onboard sound, nic, etc. An easy way to compare would be to play an mp3 or cd with the taskmanager open to show cpu usage.