Does a sound card increase computer performance?

Answer 1

No, it only improves sound quality and how many sounds can be played at once (even cheap sound cards are good these days)

Answer 2

Now this question has been raised many times. Yes it does. However it depends what you are doing. Lets say you are writing a word document and listening to music. Your not going to notice any difference at all to be honest. However if you are playing games, you can see upto a 5-10fps increase in CPU intensive games. The reason being, is when you dont have a soundcard the CPU has to do all the sound processing etc. But when you have a soundcard it is all outsources to the PCI slot. So if you are playing a graphics intensive game such as supreme commander, you could see a 5 -10 fps increase, defining the difference between playable frame rates, and unplayable. I would recommend the creative X-FI Extreme Music as a good compromise betwen cost and features.

Answer 3

Not enough to be worth paying for one if you've got integrated audio on your motherboard (and if you want to pay extra you could just put the extra money towards a faster CPU or better graphics card where you'll get a more noticeable gain).

Motherboard audio does tend to use up some of the processor as some things (like MIDI synthesis) get done in software but the load of doing that is insignificant enough not to matter in real world usage.

Motherboard integrated sound tends to be good enough for pretty much everyone anyway (and when one considers how good (or not) Creative are at releasing drivers promptly...).

Answer 4

Marginally, if you're running benchmark software to test it, but not so that you'd notice in actual operation unless you are abysmally low on memory.