Sound card recommendation (using onboard sound now)

[Punamo]

Can anyone recommend a sound card (below $100) that will:
1) Lower CPU usage during gaming
2) Sounds good for music

My speaker system is just stereo so I don't think I'll need all those fancy 3D sound features. I'm currently using Dell 400SC's onboard sound card (something like Soundmax). How is this onboard sound?

I've looked up and the best fit is probably CL Audigy 2 gamer (has hardware EAX4.0 compared to Audigy 2 LS, which is a stripped down version), but I don't have 3D speaker set, would having hardware EAX4.0 make any difference for me?

TIA.

 

[coejus]

Any sound card is going to sound fine, though you may not notice much of a difference, depending on your speakers. There hasn't been a whole lot of innovation in the market, so sound quality doesn't really differ a whole lot from (decent) card to (decent) card. The Audigies have the edge, I believe, in CPU usage as compared to other cards, so any one of those would be fine. Personally, I prefer the Santa Cruz, but your CPU usage might be marginally higher.

I've never heard of Soundmax, but I'm no onboard guru. I think any decent card will offer at least some improvement over onboard sound.

 

[Baked]

Audigy is pants because most people don't know what quality sounds like, let alone using an amp between the souce and speaker/headphone. You can either get the Chaintech AV-710, or E-MU 0404 if you want something that really kicks the living crap out of the Audigy line, $25 and $99. Audigy doesn't have any edge aside from making a number of variations based on the same chipset. Using a Barton 2.2G, upsampling playback using AV-710 and Foobar barely touches the CPU resources.

 

[Punamo]

The Chaintech seems like a good value and should provide much better sound quality. The CPU usage might abe a bit higher than Audigy's but I guess that's CL's advantage.