Not sure how good onboard sound is these days got an old SB X Fi atm but unsure how it will stack against the onboard for this board
http://www.gigabyte.com.tw/Support/Moth ... uctID=2551
Any thoughts appreciated have already got the board just not sure if the SB card is worth moving to the new board

Most of the realtek audio chipsets are CODEC chipsets, and require a little bit of your CPU when there's audio playing. It's not much, but that alone makes it worth putting the X-Fi in. Also, I doubt the ALC 889A supports true EAX. Not that many games use it, but still...

If you can spare the extra PCI slot, why not put the SB card in there?

I've used onboard sound for years now. I simply can't be arsed buying another card and the amount of driver issues they had. I even had a problem with one of my sound card's physical location. If I placed it in the PCI slot just below my network card it caused Unreal Tournament to run twice as fast, no idea why but when we played network games in my house at uni all anyone saw was me zoom accross the screen before it would disconnect me, single player rocked though.

That's besides the point though, I'd rather put more strain on the CPU than the PSU but that's because my electricity bill is huge.