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.