See Also: The Best PC Speakers for Gaming Let's talk about it, including our current top picks of the best gaming sound cards for various budgets if you do decide you're one of the few who could benefit from such a purchase. Just like optical drives, another rare inclusion in a modern PC build, there is still a time and place where buying a dedicated sound card makes sense for certain users and situations (whether internal or external we'll focus on the former in this guide). These days, the audio provided by almost all modern motherboards is more than enough in terms of quality and loudness to please the far, far majority of gamers.īut there are always exceptions to any rule, and sound cards aren't entirely dead. Then over time, the built-in audio solutions on consumer motherboards slowly but surely improved in quality, to the point where you'd be given a seriously strange look if caught including a dedicated sound card in a gaming PC build.
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, installing a sound card in your PC was the thing to do.