Lachoneus wrote:
Your aversion to integrated graphics is understandable, since they've
always been somewhere between pathetic and mediocre on the performance
scale. But you'd be hard-pressed to find a new motherboard that
doesn't have both integrated NIC and sound these days. You're better
off with an integrated NIC anyway (particularly for gigabit
ethernet), because it can run straight off the south bridge and not
tie up any PCI bandwidth. As for sound, new motherboards support
8-channel audio and SPDIF digital output, so I don't even see the
need for an add-in sound card--and nothing's stopping you from
disabling the onboard sound plugging a sound card if you want to
anyway.

You don't even need to disable the onboard sound system, you can keep it
completely enabled and still put a secondary sound card in. These days with
plug'n'play, you don't have to worry about resource conflicts as much. The
sound cards just rearrange themselves into different configurations to
accomodate whatever is in the computer.

Yousuf Khan