The P5Q has a built in sound card.
The P5Q is a model of the Asus brand of motherboards. Motherboards frequently come with onboard sound components that let you connect speakers in order to hear the audio without an additional plug-in sound card.
Motherboard Limitations
Having a sound card on the motherboard always has limitations. The most obvious is that if the motherboard goes bad so does your sound card. The other thing is that you can't take the sound card out to troubleshoot it because it is built in. Most onboard sound cards--including the P5Q--will work for most people. These sound cards work fine for computer sounds and games.
Sound Cards
Other sound cards you usually connect into a PCI or PCI express slot. These slots are card slots in the back of the motherboard that allow for the addition of many kinds of hardware devices including sound, video and more. In motherboards you can get sound in a variety of quality by many different manufacturer's. When installing an external sound card, you'll also need to install a driver that will be provided on a disk or from the website.
Using Both
If you don't like the P5Q sound card, you can install another sound card and use both. You can also go into the BIOS when the computer starts and disable the onboard audio. The BIOS is the basic input output system of the computer that tells Windows use your hardware. If you have more than one sound card installed you will have to choose which one to use for which tasks in the Control Panel and in individual applications.
Tags: sound card, onboard sound