You do also realise that the CPU cycles are still used up on motherboard sound drivers, no?... There is a difference, trust me, and I've tried many onboard sound chips, and to be honest, the sound is terrible.
Even my old Creative Sound Blaster Live tends to throw them out of the water quality wise, even without all the surround speakers support.
If you don't believe me fine, and I feel sorry for you believing your music sounds good, even if you are not a die hard music enthusiast...
Now you're just putting words in my mouth. I never said it sounded better. I just said it's not worth spending $100.00 on a sound card, when his computer is more than able to give him promising results. Try to keep up with the conversation.
Uh, his first mistake is actually using this for games.
"So, if you really want to spend an extra $100.00 for 3-10 FPS you most probably won't even notice. Be my guest. His GTX 260 is more than sufficient to power games. The average person can't tell the difference when its over 60 fps, anyways. So, unless he's trying to squeeze every fps he can. It's not worth it to spend $100.00 for, let's say 7 fps. You could have spent that $100.00 towards a gaming mouse or keyboard."
He said he wanted it for the sound quality. Which is more than a good enough reason for me. You're making stuff up and you're not even understanding the basic reasoning behind my opinion. So, I would hope you stop babbling nonsense and actually read everything I typed.