Update :
I have turned it up a notch and now have the choice between these:

m-audio revolution 5.1
creative Audigy2 Platinum eX
teratec aureon 5.1 fun

which one ?

Give head-fi and overclock hi-fi section.

They have a pinned thread with recommended products and are my go-to website for all sound device information

ql has shitty sound, nothing gonna help you if you only want it because of ql

An Audigy SE? That is so old, Like I bought one must have been 10 years ago now.

Even the Audigy 2 is soooo old. I guess soundcards have not really gone anywhere in the last 10 years they are still ok cards. That being said, I did notice after my Audigy seemed to stop working that my onboard Ac97 realtek whatever it is does skip out many sounds. Sometime pick up a megahealth and you wont hear anything because i guess it runs out of channels.

Anyway to the point i was trying to make, Dont buy Creative products they suck as a company. Go read the threads around about how creative purposely break drivers for older products to try and make them outdated so people buy new ones.

Even my Audigy SE was impossible to find working drivers for, they do not host them on the site on purpose, and before taking them down they had updated them (read crippled them) just to try and proove that 10 year old hardware is oudated (when it isnt, the audigy 1 can be modded to more advanced versions of audigy because basically creative have done nothing the last 10 years except go around breaking their drivers.)

Id be going for an Asus card, or maybe Auzentech as they make the creative hardware for creative who just box it and mess it up with bloated software.

Ofcourse if I wanted something really nice , id have to do more research as an asus card is still pretty average.

External sound cards (DACs) are generally always going to be better than internal sound cards, but often you won't have the benefit of game enhancing DSP effects in game oriented software that some internal sound cards have (then again I haven't looked too much into internal sound cards in awhile so this may no longer be the case). Externals have the benefit of having a separate power supply in contrast to internals which may receive interference with the PC power supply. They also generally have better DACs.

However Head-fi.org will most definitely have a great answer with regards to sound equipment (they're pretty much the de facto community for audio equipment).

If you don't want to spend money like me, go on Ebay and pick a Audigy 2 for almost free. Because nothing has been done about sound in the past years there is absolutely zero point buying something in the region of 100 euros. One thing to note is that if you have a really new motherboard without PCI slots then that option is out of the window.

For gaming dolby headphone (these virtual 7.1 surround things) utterly destroys the audigy 2.

For music....c'mon, really?

I'm serious. I use it with my amp and speakers and it annihilates on board sound. House parties all the time dawg! If you look at the specs the db output on pretty much any card hasn't changed a lot from the usual 98-92db. These oldies even have optical out if you are interested in surround sound. As for headphones, Dolby, EAX, and other crazy stuff to help you locate enemies, I have never really bothered. Besides like somebody else mentioned, isn't Quake pretty terrible to take advantage of those options? I doubt sound card gimmicks will make up for something that wasn't done up properly in the first place, but I don't know much about it to be honest.

How about quality :P

For music an audigy 2 is just crap these days (always have been mediocre but nowadays just crap). For gaming dolby headphone would be considered cheating at the time.

i'm not convinced with dolby headphones.

xonar dg

Yep, this. Get the PCI version instead of the PCI-E though. It has an onboard headphone amp.

Sounds quite good with my Audio Technica 32ohm's headphones. + It's cheap.

Oh really? That's fucked up considering PCI is pretty much gone now. Even I looked at recently replacing my Audigy for a PCI-E to save myself the trouble later on. Interesting why Asus would do that. Still not worth it for me to buy Xonar or XFI when I have PCI slots and my Audigy is working fine.

have you considered an asus xonar?

your internal sound card is fine and there is no point in getting anything else.

2 sound sources are awesome, and no chance of feedback from sound card.

what do you mean by two sound sources? feedback? what?

Onboard sound sometimes gives feedback, depending on the quality of the onboard.

2 sound sources, i.e. 2 sound cards are awesome, for example, my gf can watching something on my second screen on my pc while I play games. Or you can have all video / music goes through speakers and all games go through head phones without ever having to plug something in.

So you can get quite a lot of handy little uses out of a $20 sound card, which will then last 10 years. (Was using a card from 1999 til 2009 and new card since 2009 til now)