I have a new Gigabyte AMD motherboard that has nice sound, but when i take my headset over to my friends house (we are both gamers) he is using an Asus Xonar DX model and it sounds a lot better than my onboard. Way more punch and deeper bass, and also more crisp high notes. When there is an explosion it really pounds my Razer headset it's really awesome the way it sounds. My question is, is is worth it for me to spend $40.00 for an upgrade like that?

I would. I always used to add sound cards but then onboard got better. Lately I still can't find sound on onboard sound makes me happy but I always have a decent speaker system in use that can utilize a good sound card.

I would agree with Rich onboard sound is better than it use to be. A good sound card is still miles ahead. Xonar's are great dizzy and you might also check out some of Creative Labs offerings.

Thanks for Xonar I had never heard of those as I have been living with onboard soundcards for years and just decided to go back to using pci-x soundcards again. Asus has really grown.

As a supposedly well versed techie as you told me you always used sound cards, well I'm surprised =)

I used to back in the early days of XP as I have a virtual graveyard of SoundBlaster audio cards that most likley wont work in Windows or 8.