Which is better for framerate -- onboard sound or SBLive 5.1?

Heya,
I have an SBLive 5.1 and I was just going to pitch it when I assembled my new rig with the K8T Neo.  But I read a review on HardOCP (here) and it said the onboard sound is incredibly CPU intensive and Q3 took a 21% (!) framerate hit with the onboard sound activated.
They go on to advise that one should use a PCI-based sound solution, but I'm sure they mean one of the newer SB Audigy-based cards and not my (old) SB Live...
So my question is this -- is the SB Live going to be better for gaming performance (framerate) than the K8T Neo's onboard sound?  I hate to have two sound systems on my PC (redundancies always seem to cause problems) but a 20% hit on gaming is unacceptable when I'm coughing up this cash for a supposedly "high end" solution.
Thanks!
Z

While it is true that onboard sound can have a major impact on game performance (~20%), what you may not realize is that adding a PCI based solution will not eliminate the entire performance hit.  In other words, even the most modern PCI based sound cards (Audigy 2, for example) do not completely eliminate the load which audio puts on a system.  To see an example of this, Tomshardware conducted a benchmark almost a year ago which compared the framerates of several sound solutions.  
Note: the Realtek chip (ALC650 AC'97 Audio CODEC) used in the THG benchmark is an older version of the same integrated audio chip on the K8T Neo (ALC655 AC'97 Rev 2.3 Audio CODEC).  There may be a modest improvement in performance with the newer CODEC.
Now, concerning your soundcard: although your SB 5.1 Live! card may put more load on your system than a new Audigy 2 or Hercules card, it should certainly improve performance when compared to the on-board audio solution.  Sound quality should also improve (although if you have 6-channel speakers, you could only run 5 channels of audio).
The SB Live! series produced beastly little sound cards.  If you want to further improve sound quality (or need more audio channels), consider an inexpensive (~$40) Turtle Beach Santa Cruz.  Or, if you want to improve your gaming performance further, you could shell out ~$70-$100 and get a top-of-the-line OEM sound card.
In general, on-board audio blows.  You get what you pay for.
-Angler

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