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I hate to say this but you need at least decent D/A converters on your soundcard. This is so you can HEAR what you are doing. If the output is non-linear then you're simply shooting yourself in the foot right out of the gate..
Decent A/D is required if you are going to record.
There is a ton more to this than first meets the eye (ear). Don't get me started on poor clocking leading to high jitter which will REALLY messes your sound up, and unless you have trained ears you probbably won't realise.
Well, apart from no matter what you do your mixes sound "Cheap".
That said.. Great Enginner + Poor Gear > Poor Engineer + Great Gear
Of course Great Engineer + Great Gear is the goal...
In the modern paradigm of "The Computer is the Studio" you need to spend on the most bas assed CPU you can lay your hands on, decent soundcard and good monitors.
Remeber your tunes are only as good as the weakest link in the chain. Simply keeping it in the computer you might think that your quality is ok, but without the monitoring and the soundcard in the chain to hear what is going on in there you're doomed.
Bwahhhaaahahahahaa...
Sorry. /me gets coat.
Ok, back. Well done for reading this far..
Now, if you are on a budget on day one, get a sound card with at least a digital i/o so you can bypass the chintsy internal converters with some better ones later down the road. Ideally externaly clocked, as a cheap soundcard is going to have aweful Jitter.
There is a reason people pay thousands for 2 channels of DA.
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