What Sound Card to purchase?

[MystDragon]

I love Mint for the most part, and Linux, however all the distro's appear to be light years behind the corporate machine of Microsoft in the area of sound support. I did have a Asus P5NSLI motherboard, which contained a unsupported audio codec chipset. Now I have a Gigabyte GAP35 DS3L with a partially supported chipset that is supposedly suppose to have full support. Getting sound is not a problem with either of these boards, however, I do use Skype alot and must have mic input. I have yet to get the mic to work in any distro with either of these boards. I even followed the instructions on loading up the Realtek drivers and alas.. still didn't work. In fustration, I just want to know if there is a sound card out there that is fully supported out of the box, and one that is still available. Again, voice communication is the key here.

Thanks in advance,

MystDragon

[Husse]

Maybe not the answer you want but buy a decent USB headset
I have one that costs something like 25$ which works quite well in Skype - out of the box