Baoran wrote on 2023-06-23, 18:02:

You get eax with x-fi of course but would it actually cause the sound quality to be worse than the newer on board audio?

On-board audio solutions top out at EAX 2, while the X-Fi of course goes all the way to EAX 5.

Whether it's worth it or not depends on which games you want to play and what OS you have installed. If you do plan on running later EAX titles (2004-2009) under WinXP, you will certainly notice a difference. To clarify, I'm talking about EAX specifically, not overall sound quality.

The sound card consists of a digital part as well as an analog part. While specifications of digital part (frequency, bit depth, etc.) of integrated cards are superior or equal to discrete ones, quality of analog part not always are (very often not). So, if you are using headphone / line out - it is worth to check both options!
If you are using SPDIF - it should be the same exact result (it's just bit-stream).

I found that for the Z77-based MSI motherboard I bought in 2013, I was still getting slightly better (to my ears on my speaker setup) sound out of my Xonar DSX than I did from the on-board audio. My now 5-year old Gigabyte X470 board has on-board audio that is at least as good (again, in my perception) as that card, so the Xonar now lives in my Windows Vista retro box that's dedicated pretty much to analog video capture from VHS tapes.

So, my advice is to try out the X-Fi and the on-board audio and see if you like one better than the other. 2012 was getting to the point where DAC hardware was starting to become a commodity item, so see how your particular board sounds on your setup!

Not sure how trustworthy those specs the manufacturers say are but for the X-FI card SNR is suppose to be 109dB while motherboard manufacturer advertises 115dB SNR Of course when motherboard is 10 years old and sound blaster x-fi is 15 years old the caps in either of them might not be as good as new anymore.