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.
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.
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