Onboard sound worse than PCI sound for the same chipset?

[Woodchuck2000]

Just a quick musing: A number of chipsets which are commonly found onboard (such as the C-Media six-channel and the old SB PCI128) are also available on cheap PCI cards. Are there any benefits of having the PCI version? Will the CPU usage be the same for a given chipset regardless of connection method?

I can't find any benches, but if someone could point me in the right direction...

 

[AndyHui]

They should be exactly the same. The only advantage to the "onboard" sound processors is that they save 1 PCI slot.