If I buy a sound card...

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Hey everyone. I was playing FEAR on my pc when I noticed that every time I hear gun shots it lags. Sometimes it makes it unplayable. I decided to turn off integrated audio from the bios and I have improved performance on all my games. I played FEAR and it no longer skips at all. I even averaged +10 fps more than with integrated audio on. Was this happening because i was straining my cpu which is only a pentium 4? If I buy a sound card will my games still have the improved performance? I would also like to know if there was a way I could get audio through my graphics card which is a GTS 250 via HDMI? If so, do I need to purchase a cable that connects from my graphics card to the motherboard?

You might get better gaming performance with a discrete sound card if audio functionality is implemented in hardware.

AFAIK audio through HDMI on nVidia cards is done by attaching a passthrough cable from the pins of an S/PDIF device to the pins on the video card. Most, but not all, mainboards have S/PDIF headers.