Sound cards

[fatty]

Originally Posted by AVGWarhawk

Are all sound cards PCI slot?

Yes, at least the vast majority.

Originally Posted by AVGWarhawk

Do they free up your motherboard processing audio?

Something like that! Here's a quote from Wikipedia:

In the late 1990s, many computer manufacturers began to replace plug-in soundcards with a "codec" (actually a combined audio AD/DA-converter) integrated into the motherboard. Many of these used Intel's AC97 specification. Others used cheap ACR slots.

As of 2005, these "codecs" usually lack the hardware for direct music synthesis or even multi-channel sound, with special drivers and software making up for these lacks, at the expense of CPU speed (for example, MIDI reproduction takes away 10-15% CPU time on an Athlon XP 1600+ CPU).