Is a soundcard still needed these days??
 

guys, i'm looking to upgrade to a new rig. Do I still need to invest into a new high dollar soundcard like the days of old?

Nope.

I say yes, its was like night and day for me, but my board is a little aged so unsure:)

You can easily do without, though always better to have one, for instance if you want to have 7.1 surround sound at highest quality possible then go for the card.

I have 3 machines and 2 dont have them, no noticable difference with everyday use.

I like my X-fi Titanium HD. The music sounds great and there are benefits in games as well, as the sound is better and the card uses it's own memory modules to process sound. It helps with the frame rates.

If you're buying new hardware. A sound card is totally unnecessary. The CPU hit is negligible on modern hardware. Lots of motherboards support 5.1 surround.

Don't let the fan boys fool you. It's simply a waste of money.
Sound engineers have put countless hours into making the sounds in these games already sound awesome. The fancy soundcards are only applying filters and limiters to increase gain and reduce clicks and pops.
Stereo imaging, limiting, compression and all of these things can also be applied to your onboard sound.

Your speakers/headphones are much more important.

On the other hand if you plan on doing more that just playing games and listening to pre-recorded sounds, then a sound card is a must. A low latency ASIO 2.0 card will allow you to do amazing things in the sonic realm.
Onboard sound is not an option when it comes to recording and production, and even the cheapest of sound cards will allow you to do some pretty nice things with the right software.

But, what do you want to do with it?

A good soundcard is important if you want more hardware...

i have the soundblaster x-fi fatal1y champion that has a front panel with full sized input/output jacks, optical-in/out, spdif ect... and the card has a really fast processor, so i can plug in my guitar and play with no noticeable lag/delay even using amplitube or guitar-rig pro

personally i'd cry if i had to go back to on-board..

since on-board sound is often software driven and relies on your CPU and ram to process the sound, rather than having their own dedicated SPU and ram, a dedicated card might give your machine a bit better performance too.

Onboard sound is actually pretty good these days.

If you're buying a new motherboard, don't let anyone tell you you NEED an x-fi.

I have one, and enjoy some of the features, but unless you're listening to super high quality music on super high quality speakers, it's doubtful that you will notice a difference, especially since most modern onboard sound processors support 5.1 surround.

BTW the chip on the X-Fi runs at 400MHz.....

and that's pretty damn fast for just audio.

but yea u don't need a dedicated soundcard unless you're doing your own recording, or want to do something the onboard won't let you.