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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...

The problem I've seen from games and emulators is that if your CPU has the horsepower, they will max it even if they don't need it. Why does a 3D game need to render at 160 FPS when my hardware is only capable of displaying 60 FPS? It doesn't, but it's hard-coded to render as many FPS as possible so it does.

The easy fix I've found is to throttle your CPU. For older versions of Windows and Core processors, you could use a utility like RMClock to limit its max GHz. For i3/i5/i7 processors and Windows 7, you can lower the max processor performance under control panel -> power options -> change plan settings -> change advanced power settings -> processor power management -> maximum processor state. My laptop used to run 3D games at 2.4 GHz at a sweltering 88 C and fan spinning like a turbine. I limited it to 1.78 GHz (75%), which dropped the temp to 70 C and the fan noise is bearable without headphones. The drop in framerate is mostly imperceptible.

I don't know what options OS X has for throttling CPU speed, but that's what you should be looking for. Emulating really old games should easily be doable with the CPU throttled to its minimum.

Does anyone know of a good software solution until this kind of thing gets baked into the hardware?

Right now I use RM Clock
(which hasn't been updated since 2008)

It drops voltages & multipliers lower than the standard intel/windows/BIOS options.

If you have anything OLDER than an Intel i3, (ie. something between Pentium M and Core 2 duo) you can install Rmclock and lower the voltage of your laptop, so it makes less heat. You can no longer undervolt the newest laptops.

I have some PIIs and PIIIs I will sell you.

Have a look at http://www.adrianboeing.com/tools.html "CPU Speed Adjuster".

Use SpeedStep/Powernow to force the lowest clock rating to prevent a CPU burning application from chewing too much power. As well, look at Thermal throttling. http://cpu.rightmark.org/products/rmclock.shtml lets you manually set such throttling states on some processors. You can sometimes get 12.5% of the original speed.

Mind you, even on my insanely powerful laptop, I can type filezilla and hit return faster than it shows results, but it works, and filezilla is running ~2 seconds after I hit return. I never actually see the results in the search screen.

I see similiar results on my laptop as well! I wouldn't call my laptop insanely powerful though. I have a C2D T5250. It's underclocked to 773mhz...

Vista defintely has some problems, but it isn't merely as bad as people make it out to be...

modern processors are more than capable for providing great audio at a tiny fraction of available CPU cycles.

I don't get it. If you wanted a low power system, why would you buy the top chip and underclock it?

The Athlon64 4000+ is a Hammer chip, iirc. It's manufactured on a 0.13nm process, and is a slightly older core. Instead of using that chip, why not use the Athlon 3800+? The Winchester and Venice cores are both 0.09nm chips, and run much, much cooler and dissipate much less heat than the Hammer cores. And you can use AMD's Cool n Quiet (aka PowerNow) technology to back off the processor speed to half speed automatically, when the processor isn't seeing heavy use. Coupled with a utility like RMClock on windows or a custom written utility on Linux (if your 2.6 kernel has the necessary options enabled, you simply have to write to some files in /sys), you can undervolt the chip even more than AMD's driver allows. My Athlon64 3200+ spends most of its time at 1 volt, 1 GHz, and it runs at ambient temperature. That's right, the heat generated is so little that on a stock cooler, the processor does not raise its own temperature significantly. And if a 3800+ with CnQ is too powerful, you can back down to the 3500, 3200, or 3000 models, depending on your exact needs.

Problem solved, and without several pages of blathering about underclocking.

If you want to test your sound card you can get this program to see how your sound card stacks up to the muvo. muvo specs here You'll need to run a cable from your speaker out to your stereo input on your soundcard...

But if your headphones suck, it really won't matter will it :D