This question comes up every

[Aaron Ledger]

This question comes up every so often. There have been some efforts in the past to have internal amplifiers for PCs, but they have gone away. Those weren’t such a great idea, primarily due to the heat, bulkiness and power requirements of the solution. When it comes to external amplifiers, you can find dedicated amplifier only solutions, however, these are typically aimed at the high-end audio market and generally cost much more than a receiver. Your best bet really is a receiver. You also will generally have improved audio experience all around by going with a receiver as PCs just aren’t that good out-of-the-box. PCs typically will feature inferior DACs and not have a lot of nice audio features found in receivers (or do those features as well or conveniently).