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It wasn't too long ago that if you wanted good or even passable sound from your computer,

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you'd need a dedicated sound card.

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But nowadays, even though you can still buy them, most PC enthusiasts recommend you skip the sound card

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entirely and just instead use the audio that's integrated into your motherboard.

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So how did this happen? To understand, we need to take a look back

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at why dedicated sound cards even existed in the first place.

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You know that little PC speaker that comes with some other boards that beeps at you

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to let you know that your computer booted okay or has some kind of issue?

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Well, way back during the 1980s,

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when the original IBM PC and compatibles ruled the day,

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a larger version of that little speaker was the only source of sound for many users.

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This means that you would be limited to just beeps and boops, though there were some tricks

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that programmers used to get the PC speaker to make other sounds, such as this box piece

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that was used as the intro to a 1982 classic

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called Paratrooper. As you can tell, the speaker didn't exactly sound

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all that great and early PC CPUs also had

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to more or less drop everything else they were doing while that speaker was trying to chirp at you.

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So obviously a better solution was needed. So the idea was to offload audio processing

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to a separate sound card so that the system wouldn't have to depend solely on the main CPU.

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And as the years went by, sound cards supported more and more features and better and better audio quality,

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partly due to their role as hardware accelerators, meaning that the extra hardware on the sound card

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could do the heavy lifting of processing all that audio instead of leaving it all to the CPU.

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Similar actually to the difference between having a discrete graphics card and onboard graphics,

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except without a dedicated area on the CPU die for audio.

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And while it is true that integrated audio for motherboards became more prevalent in the late 1990s

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thanks to Intel's AC97 audio codec that got incorporated into onboard chips,

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sound cards were still more powerful solutions that delivered noticeably better quality.

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So folks that care about audio didn't have much reason to ditch sound cards just yet.

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That said, sound cards weren't perfect. Because hardware acceleration for audio

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was implemented differently by different manufacturers,

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you needed a specific driver for your car to work properly.

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Kind of like how you need a specific AMD or NVIDIA driver these days for your graphics card

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to function. These drivers were often notoriously poorly written

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and unstable. So starting in Windows Vista,

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Microsoft tried to standardize how audio was handled,

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which also enabled features like per application volume control from the operating system itself.

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And did it by forcing the system to handle audio in software

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instead of through a hardware accelerated card. This meant that the CPU was suddenly handling

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a lot more audio processing. And in games and other applications

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that were built around hardware acceleration in the form of a sound card,

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many users experienced buggy audio and performance issues early on.

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However, the good news is that by this point, CPUs were already powerful enough

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to handle audio processing without a big performance hit,

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a far cry from the early PCs we mentioned previously.

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So as applications started to catch up and support software based standards

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like Microsoft's universal audio architecture, it became the case that all you needed

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for good quality sound was a modern CPU and an audio device that supported UAA,

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such as those real tech HD audio chips that are now ubiquitous on all motherboards.

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These chips are much simpler than full blown sound cards.

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As much of the work that would be done by a sound card's processor

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can be handled by the main CPU of the system, leaving the real tech chip to handle simpler tasks

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like digital to analog conversion. And as quality has improved on the real tech chips themselves

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and motherboard manufacturers have taken care in designing their audio circuits

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so that they won't be as affected by electrical interference from the rest of the system,

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today we're at the point where onboard audio is actually quite good.

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Separate sound cards, while they can still give slightly better audio quality,

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are often only recommended for enthusiasts who need the extra processing muscle

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for a niche applications or for specific ports. But even users who need a bit more power

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for their high impedance headphones are often advised to get an external DAC slash amp

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instead of a sound card. As external solutions are often isolated completely

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from the electrically noisy environment inside a PC.

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But if you do end up needing a sound card for some reason,

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don't think that their development has been totally neglected. I mean, after all, you can get them with RGB.

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So thanks for watching guys, like this video, subscribe, follow us, do all that stuff,

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and also hit us up in the comments with your suggestions for topics

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that we should hit in the future.