If you've been a PC user for a while, you might remember the days when a sound card was an essential part of building a gaming PC. It was the only way to ensure quality audio output, but things have changed, and now the best motherboards have onboard audio chips that rival those discrete sound cards. That's just as well, as with larger graphics cards and fewer usable PCIe slots, using a sound card is harder to do. But what if I told you that I don't use either because I've found that using an external audio source is superior, whether I'm using wired or wireless headphones? It's also not just because, by using the same external hardware, I can use it across multiple builds and even on laptops while enjoying the same audio quality that I'm used to. There are many other good reasons that using onboard audio will hurt your experience.

5 Signal interference

The space inside your PC is full of electromagnetic interference

Almost every electronic device emits some level of EMI (electromagnetic interference), which can manifest in different ways. The most egregious for PC users is coil whine, caused when the induction coils on your graphics card or other components vibrate at specific frequencies. It's a shrill, screaming noise like a slipping fanbelt, and if you've ever heard it, you know the pain it causes.

But that's not the only effect EMI can have on your PC. The onboard audio circuit is susceptible to interference. The better-quality motherboards run a completely separate power circuit to the audio chips to try to mitigate issues, but there are many other situations where that doesn't help. The rise of SFF cases where the GPU and motherboard are sandwiched together with a PCIe riser cable connecting the two has led to EMI manifesting in the internal audio circuitry again.

The same happens in larger cases when you use a vertical GPU mount, so you really can't avoid EMI issues with onboard audio. What you can do is move the audio source outside the case, whether that's a USB soundcard or more expensive DAC and Headphone Amp stacks. That way, the EMI generated by your PC is kept inside your chassis and doesn't affect your sound.

4 Low power output

Onboard sound just can't compete with external sources

Onboard audio is often an afterthought, there to give the user an easily accessible audio output when they need it. For the majority of PCs, motherboards, and laptops, it's not designed to power audiophile-level headphones or really anything more powerful than a pair of IEMs, earbuds, or lower-power headphones. That changes when you move the audio chain outside the case, as you can get headphone amps that plug into their own power supply, increasing the level of power you can supply to your headphones. Even USB-powered solutions are often more powerful than onboard audio jacks, and will work with a much wider range of headphones.

3 Can use balanced headphones

Remove ground hum while increasing power output

This might be more of a personal choice, but my ears tell me that balanced headphones sound better, so that's what I want to use all the time. The only way to do this is with an external headphone amp that has its own power supply, with an XLR balanced output. Currently, I'm using the Schiit Ragnarok 2 because it also drives passive speakers, but there is a wide range of external headphone amps that are much more affordable and have balanced outputs. The biggest improvement I've found is with planar magnetic headphones, as most headphone amps give more power on the balanced output than on the single-ended outputs.

2 Analog volume control is just better

Digital volume control introduces its own quirks to your audio

When dealing with audio, there are so many stages in the chain that all add up and affect the final output. The signal to your source device, whether that's to onboard audio chips or to an external DAC, makes a huge difference in the overall resolution that you hear, and you want this signal to be the best quality it can. Reducing the volume in software, whether that's Windows Sound Engine or the software drivers that power your onboard audio chip, will negatively affect the sound you hear. That's because it effectively reduces the bit depth, so once you've reduced the digital volume by so much, you're effectively listening to lower-quality audio.

That doesn't happen when you send a 100% volume signal out to an external DAC and headphone amp because the signal is treated as line level, and volume adjustments are done with the physical volume controls. These are mostly going to be more accurate and sound better than the digital controls. The only time it might be different is if you're using over 80% volume on the knob, where you might run into distortion because of the high amplification levels, but you really shouldn't be using your amp that high anyway, as it's harmful to your ears.

1 Wireless headphones are convenient

You can't walk around wearing wired headphones

It's advantageous to avoid the onboard sound chip in one other situation: when you want wireless connectivity. The best wireless headphones for your PC will use a USB dongle or transmitter to send 2.4GHz wireless to your headphones, which gives you the convenience of no wires. The headphones have a high enough sample rate that you won't notice it as much compared to wired headphones, but the drop in audio quality is easily offset by not being constrained by a headphone wire.

I much prefer gaming with wireless headphones, even though I have multiple audiophile-level headphones because it's not just the lack of wire to get tangled in. It's the convenience of having a microphone at the ready, the ability to go upstairs and get snacks without taking them off, and the different tuning of the drivers that's designed to accentuate in-game sounds for clarity.

Onboard audio has gotten better, but there are plenty of reasons you won't want to use it

In the years I've been building and using PCs, I've seen onboard audio transform from a simple speaker to discrete sound cards and back to onboard sound chips that are nearly as good as the discrete versions. But in all of that time, I've found better quality audio from moving the output device out of the case and onto my desk, and I won't go back. Whether I'm using a wired set of headphones on a DAC/Amp stack, or wireless gaming headsets for convenience, the benefits of having the audio chain outside the EMI-saturated chassis are worth the extra cost.