I used to think that way but i think we have reached a point where onboard sound is very decent and good enough for a lot of people. Of course a dedicated soundcard is always going to be better.

I don't disagree that it's good for a lot of people, but this entire forum is based off of mostly ideas and hardware that are far beyond what is good for "most people" lol I tried the onboard sound on my ASUS ROG Crosshair VI, and said "nope".

AMD also only has 16 lanes on current Ryzen chips, so how is that any different?

They have 24, and SATA/USB/NVMe in the CPU itself.

Looking forward to AMD's offering in that space. Just had to turn down Ryzen for a GPU-render based workstation because it didn't offer enough PCI-E lanes for 3 GPUs at 8x 🙁

Hi there Difference in rendering between x16 and x8 is really small,if you are looking at more PCI_E lanes then X99 Xeon or 5930k/6850k onwards is best bet if you are want more PCI_E lanes I do render with several renderers like Cycles, IRAY, SuperFly or Octane and difference between x8/x16 is really small in these renderers Hope this helps Thanks, Jura

I've yet to see any 2066 Xeons (I know all 2066 are technically Xeons), RIP eBay ES market.