I have a Sound Blaster Audigy Platinum I've been hanging on to for more than a couple years now. Once upon a time I bought it for recording some guitar tracks (and the front inputs are convenient). Just wondering if anyone thinks its worth it to keep the card in there for gaming.

Would there any benefit to upgrade it or just dithing it and using the onboard sound that every motherboard comes with these days? I do have onboard sound on my current motherboard, but I've disabled it. I only use headphones to play.

Edit: Its Audigy 1 if that matters so yeah its a bit older.

It's another thing your CPU doesn't have to do, so I don't see the harm in keeping it. I'm probably going to end keeping my old SB Live! 5.1 for a while yet.

i would suggest keeping it in there, its not doing harm, and if u get a random urge to record it's there

I would definitely keep it. Better sound quality and, as Overclocked mentioned, less CPU cycles are needed for it.

So the Onboard sound chip still lets the CPU do most of the work? (if thats true, thats another thing I didn't know)

Unless you're running an old nForce 2 board with the SoundStorm APU then yes, that is the case.

Yeah, it's the same reason a dedicated video card will always perform better than integrated graphics.
Instead of the CPU doing all of the work whilst simultaneously running just about everything else, it simply has to take the time to re-direct the work to the dedicated device. It's a little different with sound cards, but long story short the CPU just has to send the work to the card and forget about it.

I was aware that onboard video is well... just wrong, unless you really don't care. Good to know about the sound card though.