is it worth adding a soundcard ?

[eastyy]

my pc already has a built in sound card which does the job ok but wondered if a pci soundcard offeres any performance increase at all ?

[abigsmurf]

Not really, especially if you have Windows 7 or Vista which limit what sound cards can do (buggy sound card drivers were the leading cause of blue screens in xp). The cpu hit of AC97 emulated sound cards is so minimal as to be impossible to measure.

[mekanor]

I'm no expert on these things, but I've been lead to believe if you're serious enough about getting some serious sound out of your computer to want to use something other than the onboard soundcard, you should be using optical out or something and letting an amp do the decoding.

[speedlolita]

Hugely, if you require nice sound - but you'd obviously need the speakers.

I'd recommend a card with hardware processing. Minimum you should be aiming for is a X-Fi Xtreme Music.