Radio Shack once made some nice bang-for-the-buck budget audio under their "Realistic" brand.

Found this online, you need Perl's Chatbot::Eliza and espeak installed:

http://www.husseinsspace.com/t...

To save Slashdotters the time to actually click the link, pasted below.

#!/usr/bin/perl

use Chatbot::Eliza;

srand( time ^ ($$ + ($$ command_interface;

my $you_say = 'hello';

while ( $you_say !~ /bye/ )
{
      $eliza_says = $mybot->transform( $you_say );
      print $mybot->name, ": $eliza_says \n";
      system ("espeak -ven+f3 \"$eliza_says\"");
      print 'You : ';
      $you_say = ;
}

exit;

Mod this guy informative! An AGP card that does HDMI!

They do? Didn't know that. (I have one)

Like the N64 RAM upgrade? That might work, and is an interesting idea. Though I'm not sure that would be feasible to install for some users. And you know how people are about how "addons always fail".

" Now you're just sounding like an undiscerning fanboy instead of a thoughtful admirer."
Just like Inman.

"that the huge explosion in Tunguska back in 1908 was caused by Tesla trying to build a time machine.
you're an idiot. In fact, that so idiotic I think it rippled back in time and cause bigfoot's head to explode and THAT'S what caused Tunguska. That is just a plausible as your statement.

Lots?

There used to be a saying the all Jr.s Senator were told:
"If you can't take their money, drink their liquor, fuck their women and still vote against them, you don't belong in politics."

I don't think he cares.

https://www.opensecrets.org/po...

That would have my vote.
OTOH, I think they might be better in the house.

I use a 12.4 channel Obecalp System with moon rock cables!

If you want to be serious with gaming, you need clear speakers. Have a dedicated channel to the spy cloaking sound is awesome.

You could have just said "I'm, a pretensions audiophile!'*
Unless you have a high end speaker and map system, yes on board IS good enough.
Also, I high end system needs a game that uses it as well.

*I know, it's redundant.

On one hand a FACT based science museum for Tesla is cool. OTOH Inman a rude asshat when you point out some of what he says about Tesla is false.

well get you power up to government standards.

It is easy to make good DACs these days. Basically any DAC, barring a messed up implementation, is likely to sound sonically transparent to any other in a normal system. When you look at the other limiting factors (amp, noise in the room, speaker response, room reflections, etc) you find that their noise and distortion are just way below audibility. Ya, maybe if you have a really nice setup with a quiet treated room, good amps, and have it set for reference (105dB peak) levels you start to need something better than normal, but that isn't very common. Even then you usually don't have to go that high up the chain to get something where again the DAC is way better than other components.

Now that said, there can be a reason to get a soundcard given certain uses. For example you don't always want to go to an external unit, maybe you use headphones. In that case, having a good headphone amp matters and onboard sound is often remiss in that respect (then again, so are some soundcards). Also even if you do use an external setup, you might wish to have the soundcard do processing of some kind. Not so useful these days, but some games like to have hardware accelerated OpenAL.

Regardless, not a big deal in most cases. Certainly not the first thing to spend money on. If you have $50 speakers, don't go and buy a $100 soundcard. If you have a $5000 setup, ok maybe a soundcard could be useful, but only in certain circumstances.

As a side note, the noise in a PC isn't a big issue. Properly grounding/shielding the card deals with it. A simple example is the professional LynxTWO, which is all internal yet has top notch specs, even by today's standards. http://audio.rightmark.org/tes...