Best bet for you is to try out both using your normal speakers/headphones and let your ears tell you which is better. For myself, I use a stereo pair of bookshelf speakers and a receiver for my normal sound, thus I never use digital output or more than two channel audio. When I game I use headphones. I have a number of computers and the onboard sound on some of them sounds just fine to me. On others, sound has static, is crackly or picks up mouse/HDD noises, thus I use PCI sound cards. Doesn't really matter which sound chip used (mostly ALC, some CMI) or which chipset, or even which motherboard manufacturer, just that some implementations on particular boards are crappy. For instance, my Abit VH6T has two channel sound (I think with ALC201) that sounds perfectly fine. My Abit IS7 has some fancy 5.1 sound with digital in/out, but the sound picks up mouse movement and hard drive seeks (other people have experienced this with the IS7). My Epox 8RDA+ (with MCP-T) sounds just fine, until the system warms up during gameplay, then the sound will start lagging a few seconds behind the gameplay and also crackle a bit until eventually the sound dies totally until I reboot. I've reduced this effect quite a bit by putting a Zalman heatsink on the Southbridge and using a Zalman fan bracket with an NMB fan pointed down on it (this in a case with very good airflow). The Southbridge on this board would otherwise get burning hot to the touch. My other Epox, an 8RDA (MCP -no- T) has even worse sound. From a cold start the sound crackles. I picked up the board used so maybe the Southbridge overheated and fried the sound. My Dell Inspiron 1100 notebook has a bit of noticeable hiss and crackle with good speakers - I noticed when trying to use it for playing stuff through my TV and with audio hooked up to my home theater system.
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