For gaming dont use a soundcard, it produces latency.
Funny, because people have been using sound cards for gaming since the 80s. 1990-2006 were probably the best years for that because of hardware acceleration in microsoft Operating systems. Gaming audio was extremely big business. These days, its pretty much dead. There is no real drive to release sound cards (let alone speakers. Remember when Creative used to make their own gaming speakers? They still do but nobody wants to buy them) for gaming unless companies are lying or nostalgia baiting. There hasnt been anything that replaced Hardware Acceleration/Accelerated Audio technologies and since the whole gimmick of having a creative card was EAX support - that died along with Hardware Acceleration.
But i digress. Latency is everywhere. Your mouse has latency. Your monitor has latency. Even keyboards have latency. Every input device has latency. But its at such low levels that its not even worth talking about. The only time i had serious latency issues when i was running a Intel PIII 500mhz with a ATi 9600SE trying to play DeusEx (the first one) in over the top settings then what my PC could handle. Id move the mouse to the right and the crosshair would follow about 10 seconds later.... This was some 20 years ago.
Sometimes Xonar soundcards create a lot of latency if you have their EAX emulation turned on and are playing an EAX title. Asus Xonar soundcards never did well with EAX on and thats why i ditched them after having a DX2 & STX for many years. Asus's drivers were also pretty damn bad and there was no real direct support from Asus - only user to user support on their forums unless you file a support ticket with them.
