Sound cards used to be a big part of gaming machines in the 90s and 2000s but have largely gone extinct in the wake of powerful CPUs doing the sound themselves. Sound cards were expensive back then ...

Back in the 90s, gamers loaded out their PCs with Creative’s Sound Blaster family of sound cards. Those who were really serious about audio could connect a daughterboard called the Creative Wave ...

If these were the early 2000s. We would have said that having a sound card is a flex. With good reason, too. You'd slap one into your PC, crank up a media player, and pretend you were mastering audio.