The Mystery Of The AC97 Sound...

[Hammer]

AC97 Audio is pretty good by itself. The Live! and Audigy cards have an edge because of various hardware acceleration techniques. I thought I read once that most on-board audio chips can use between 5-15% CPU utilization, while the Live! card uses about 2-3%. Of course, that was a few years ago. I still prefer a dedicated sound card, especially since the Audigy's digital to analog converter is pretty amazing, and the Creative cards have a software controlled equalizer. The built-in audio on my VIA266a motherboard is weak and tinny, my nForce2 board is too muddy.

My ASUS builtin Sound Storm (MCP-T)  rivials my SbLive 5.1 DE.

For audio related benchmarks refer to
http://audio.rightmark.org/

[Hammer]

The problem is with the Win32 kernel,

I recall, Win32 is the application layer, which sits on top of NT’s Executive (includes NT’s kernel). Windows 2K/XP system drivers run on kernel level not on application level.