[Ingo]

I just picked up a Dell box mainly for my wife to be able to work from home. I threw my FLAC collection on it and setup Foobar the other day and when I plugged my Grados in I was pleasantly surprised. This onboard audio sounds much better to my ears than the old Realtek 97 audio on my old PC. That PC I built from scratch as an audio PC with silent fans/PSU and an EM-U 1212m soundcard but I listened to the onboard audio quite a bit just for the heck of it. This sound is nothing like the 1212m which is clinical and really accurate but it's a nice sound with plenty of bass and IMO kicks the crap out of an iPod or even good little portables like the Sansa Clip/Fuse.
 
Has anyone else noticed how good this Intel HD Audio is?

 

[TwoEars]

Yupp, I have it in my laptop and it's not bad at all.
 
I think the motherboard manufacturers are starting to wake up aswell.
 
It's almost impossible to buy a none-server board in the +$150 price range which doesn't make a big deal about its onboard sound these days. Asus in particular has gone to great lenghts to isolate the sound PSU from the rest of the motherboard etc.
 
It's not really that hard to make good sounding basic stuff these days, select a decent chip, pick some nice op-amps, give it clear power. It's not exactly rocket science and if they're willing to spend a few bucks on it and the time to figure out what works we should be seeing more of it for sure. It's good for us and makes a great selling point.