I have to agree with you in once sense AdamW, sound is an important factor. If you're spending more than fifty quid on speakers, or if you use a decent pair of headphones, you'll notice a huge difference if you buy a £100 soundcard compared to an onboard one or a £10 card. That said, if you run dirt cheap speakers, you need to upgrade those. You should typically spend just under twice as much on your sound card as you do on your speakers for maximum sound quality in my experience (with a few rules to break, like you probably want to spend a bit less than twice as much on your soundcard, maybe 1.3 times).