dac bypass everything?

[mindmenglish]

does dac bypass everything on the audio quality?

for example is it better to get an a mac or i5 laptop with beats audio or just budget pentium laptop with onboard soundchip?

 

[pauln]

Beats audio is a marketing gimmick - the laptops internal speakers might be slightly better than they would otherwise be i.e crap as opposed to really crap.

If your laptop is not going to be used for other tasks that demand a lot of computing power, a Pentium powered machine and a USB DAC such as this http://epiphany-acoustics.co.uk/products-page/dacs/e-dac-24bit-miniature-usb-dac/ will give you good results. You will of course need to plug the analogue output from the DAC into your amplifier or some powered speakers...