I understand that a sound card (the good ones at least) reduce the amount of CPU usage while playing game. How much would a sound card influence the performance of my system when gaming?

Keep in mind that my CPU is the weak point of my setup. I can play pretty much every game I am interested in with a reasonable amount of detail and get decent performance. Would a sound card would help my computer play games slightly better?

Another question. If I completely turn off sound in a game would that give me a a good indication of the performance gain I would get if I had a sound card?

I am considering buying the Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi XtremeGamer Sound Card.

http://snipurl.com/2ed0v

From the benchmarks I have seen its usually not a gain of more than 1 or 2 frames per second in most games. It's really not that huge of a difference at all. However it is worth buying a soundcard such as that one if you have a good set of speakers or plan on buying a good set soon. If you got crappy speakers its really not worth buying even an affordable $80 soundcard.

Creative has a new offering out that uses PCI-X1.
IF you don't have a sound card but want to support 5.1 or 7.1 speaker setups then I'd look into this one. http://tinyurl.com/5rfn8m
It does offload a lot of the 3D sound effects to the card based SPU, but as stated before, if you are doing stereo or less than 5.1 there is probably no reason to go with this solution.

Gerritt

Thanks for the replies.

I will not be investing in the sound card I mentioned in my original post.