I've been using onboard sound for about a decade already, and I'd like to have some improvements in my sound quality. I'm thinking of getting a cheap sound card; right now I'm looking at the Creative Audigy, which costs only about 30 dollars. Is the sound improvement worth the $30?

What kind of hardware do you have?

Rather old rig. CPU is AMDx2 4200+, motherboard is MSI K9N Ultra (nforce 570). Speakers are a two-speaker Altec Lansing setup.

I read somewhere that games today use more resources for sound. You have things like ambient sounds, reverbs and echoes etc, which take a lot of processing power away from the mainboard. Not sure if that's true, that's why I'm asking.

Don't. The cheapy Audigy cards ARE COMPLETE CRAP. I had an Audigy 4 for years and had sound issues, until I got a used Fatal1ty XTremegamer and bam, all my problems were gone.

'Course, they're $100 used, so they may not be an option...

If your computer's that old, a sound card would certainly help. A cheap sound card won't do anything for you in a newer computer, and Creative Labs is the bottom of the sound card barrel anyway.

if you already have good speakers or headphones, good sound cards are:

Auzentech X-Fi series
ASUS Xonar series
Creative Labs, but only the Extreme Gamer and up; lesser Creative Labs cards are worthless.

It is, but depends on the game, and how it processes music. If the game uses OGG / MP3 / some similar crap, you can forget about the CPU using more power to process the audio. It would be barely noticeable, like only a few FPSes out of the hundred that you'd normally get (if the game didn't have any audio). Sadly, most games tend to use this crappy way of presenting us the atmosphere / sound / whatever that you can hear.

If it uses raw audio, has complex algorithms that process the sound in real time (and not just to select a track to play, like most games out there), then the sound card upgrade wouldn't be a bad idea... if you have the hardware to make use of it.

Using headphones / speakers?

Speakers. Two Altec Lansing ones. I plan to upgrade them soon though, but because of limited desk space, I'll probably still be going for a 2-speaker setup.

I'm not much of an audiophile. My main purpose for getting this upgrade is to better support my gaming experience. :(

I don't need something really high end, as long as it serves the purpose of having reasonable SFX. Besides I can't crank the bass too loud, as I'm worried the neighbours downstairs will complain.

Then don't get anything. It is not worth unless you can fully utilize the card, by having quality surround system or headphones, playing games that properly use the card, and so on..

That motherboard uses a Realtek ALC 883 audio chip. It's very common, and it's pretty good. Unless you want to do a lot of audio recording, a cheap sound card will do no better, and an expensive hardware-accelerated or audiophile sound card would be wasted with your speakers. You'll get more mileage out of tweaking the configuration/equalizer/effects application that came with the motherboard.

WinXP SP3 Will a sound card help performance with games?

I have an old Audigy 2, I think it works just fine :P

If you're after the 1-3 FPS that you may* get, then yes. :)

*depends on the game you're playing.

Not a non-accelerated card like an Audigy. These don't offload any processing from the CPU. They're no different from having an onboard sound chip, only the chip is sitting on a card that you paid more money for.

Windows 7 and Vista screwed with the DirectSound stack so that not even accelerated cards offer a performance advantage anymore; you need to resort to kludges like Creative ALchemy to get any acceleration.

That surprises me a little I had a SB Live! value for several years and it was quite reliable, at the time I picked it up for like $40 new with the purchase of some other components.
Hmm, that might explain why my audio gets so choppy when I'm playing Warzone 2100 near the end of the game. Under normal conditions the sound is just fine. Hadn't really thought about the lack of acceleration as being the issue.