Soundblaster Omni 5.1 USB to ??

[Columbo]

Currently got the above with my desktop and wondering if I have anything to gain by moving to internal card? Primary use is gaming and I use a Hyper X Cloud X Pro headset with it.

If so which card would you recommend. My motherboard is a Gigabyte Z87 with an i7 2600k so the onboard would be better I'm happy to just use that.

 

[VonScar]

Depending on your motherboard. And set-up, it is hard to say.

Most likely if you went internal sound card, it would use the PCE I express one socket on the board. If you have say a 6700K or an Intel CPU, you would perhaps limit a crossfire set-up or SLI set-up by doing so as the cards would no longer be 8 x 8 lanes, it might clock down to something like 8 x 4 lanes. If you have a single GPU, or on-chip graphics then this point will be academic.

The only thing that I can say on internal vs USB, would that latency of USB vs an internal soundcard may be very slightly lower.

Why don't you simply try the motherboard sound out for a while and see what you prefer? Sound cards generally boost loudness and offer good support for headphones, but many may not notice the difference.

Cheers

Von