While I haven't seen any sort of performance hit from that chip, I just recently switched to a motherboard with that chip and I can say that, at least in my experience, the sound on it is pretty awful. I moved from an ultra-low-end Audigy SE card to the VT1708S, and the sound seems very tinny and without much depth at all. It works moderately OK for TF2 (which is pretty much all I play these days) on headphones, but for music, it's atrocious.