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And yet it still sounds the same to me.

Good price for a 24 bit sound card, not so good before rebate though.

so what's the point of add-on sound cards for desktops?

every modern motherboard comes with onboard sound, many with digital outs, which will satisfy any casual computer user. any serious computer musician will buy a real sound card with 1/4 ins/outs, like a Presonus FireBox.

i have no doubt this is higher quality than many onboard sound cards, but it's still no pro quality, leaving it in no man's land...

Bragging rights for pimply-faced kids.

#3, so there are only 2 types of computer users, casual and serious computer musicians?

what if I don't want the crappy on-board sound system crackling and popping while playing music and sucking up 10-20% of my CPU?

#3, this sound card is great for a HTPC. You don't need the complexities of a $300 card, but get great movie/music sound for sub $60.

The on board sound cars on todays motherboards are good enough for about 99% of the computer users. The cpus are fast enough to easily handle the small load the onboard sound puts out.

The 116 db is bogus and applies only to analog connections. As the months go by, companies will keep increasing their "SNR" rating to convince customers that their current model is better than the previous one. The SNR is far less than that and is greatly affected by tons of factors like interference caused by your psu, your monitor, your m0therboard and pretty much whatever is in your case, your monitor, even wall outlet power variations.
If you use the Spdif ( which all HTPC's SHOULD ideally use ) then all soundcards will sound the same , without exception- an onboard chipset will sound the same as an M-audio revolution . Onboard sound cards do consume some cpu juice and the effects are noticeable no matter how fast your cpu is, you won't notice a frame rate drop but you will certainly notice occasional "stuttering" during gaming - ie the cpu is "waiting" for the soundcard to finish it's previous task before assigning it another. In some games, sounds may be glitchy, for example in half life, my onboard soundcard can't correctly reproduce the shotgun sound during continuous fire.
Also, onboard sound chipsets don't come with driver updates. I'll bet Microsoft does'nt give a rat's behind either about sound clipping off on onboard realtek chipsets playing COD.
On the other hand, any decent add-on card manufacturer would care to address glitches with newer drivers.
That said, many newer "advanced" sound cards claiming to have "X-ram" and those fancy features are not worth the extra $. They make a difference in cpu consumption over a standard pci card, but only fractionally - those are primarily marketing gimmics.As for the "extra sounds" associated with those X-ram cards, I have'nt noticed any difference. The main speed boost is obtained when you jump from onboard sound -> a decent add on pci/pci-e card
I personally use a Diamond monster sound DDL that I bought off <a rel="nofollow" href="/merchants/ebay-coupons-9/jump/" tar... [Truncated]

I tried one at store. I couldn't hear the difference compared to a onboard sound card. I think good speakers are more important. (I must be one of the 99% that cannot tell the difference).

Will this work with Vista 64bit