True, in Croatia we trade in these guys:

And they're not worth that much. They're just cute.

get 10 ps4s and some duct tape

I would use some of that money to get a really good HDD enclosure, some enterprise level HDD and setup a Raid... ...for my porn collection (because you can never be too careful protecting porn).

I probably don't know enough about everything it takes to build a PC. But with 4 Grand I know I could definitely make a kick ass build with the assistance of someone who knew what they were doing.

Absoluetly not......get a good sound card....get astro REAL surround sound head set or something of equal qaulity....not that bulshit emulated surround.....

It's not a small difference....it's a big difference....you will think you are firing a real gun...

I would rather get a laptop.

Guess it depends on your intentions with your PC.

I have a family and therefore we do not blast the PC when its in use as that would annoy everyone else in the home.

So its either kept at a decent volume or you're wearing headphones.

In either case, the sound is just fine as is and I think mobo sound is more than acceptable for 98% of users.

Heres a little something that's a bit of an eye opener from The Tech Report describes what it's like when you don't know what your really missing with audio....

That brings me to the question we posed at the beginning of this review, which is whether you really need a sound card at all. The simple answer is no. You can get by with integrated audio and live blissfully unaware of what you're missing or stubbornly claim that no difference exists. I bet you could get by playing games at lower resolutions and without antialiasing and anisotropic filtering, too. You probably don't really need a solid-state drive to load games a few seconds faster, and you'd likely survive with two CPU cores rather than four or six. The question is not whether you need those upgrades, but if they're worth the additional expense. In the case of the $30 Xonar DG, the answer is a definitive yes. If you have halfway decent headphones or speakers, the DG offers a very real step up in sound quality for what amounts to a pittance. 

Bold/underline is the key part of the entire aguement.

Its not just the $30 additional card, but also the $nnn cost for quality speakers/surround/headphones that are required. I still argue that unlike video, super quality-quality audio is not as much of a benefit to the mass consumer.

I worked for 10yrs as a commision sales person with Circuit City well before it went under. I continuously lived in the audio dept and the high end sound room. I know exactly the quality differences you're speaking about. I just argue that I don't see, or hear rather, the value difference as I do with video. I literally hear the difference, just not to a point where I'm willing to add a couple hundred dollars to the cost of my build.

I wish Creative didn't destroy Aureal A3D, arguable the pinnicle of PC sound.

PC's are naturally a noisy place though, even a cheap sound card can have benefits, but not everyone cares about Audio quality or have a decent set of speakers anyway, on-board audio is perfectly fine for the majority of users.