[Kirby64]

The chips used themselves for sound are perfectly fine. It’s pretty much all Realtek codecs on any motherboard. And even on the sound blaster cards. The only difference between onboard and dedicated cards is a bit more thought and care is put into shielding and external component selection, which can have a pretty big effect on performance. That tends to be the big difference between onboard and dedicated cards. Nobody hears the difference between 16 bit 48khz and 24 bit 96/192khz anyways. But bad component placement or selection can add noise, THD+N, and other problems.