I use onboard sound. Is something like this fairly straight forward? Any bloated software to use? Seems like external is the preference though. Honestly wouldn't mind keeping airflow around the GPU less cluttered myself, although having it all in the case would certainly be nice. Any simple way to use this or similar with both my headset and speakers? I switch between the two frequently. Problem is, I have a Hyper X Cloud and some Creative Speakers. Neither are top of the line. Probably would be wasted on high end audio equipment anyways. Cloud is going strong, but I may replace it in two years so this would be partially for future headsets / speaker/monitors in mind.
EVGA is usually good at keeping the bloat down in their software, even if their software is often buggy or just unintuitive. A lot of external solutions don't need drivers at all, so if you want to avoid any kind of software that is the route to go.