External sound card to help reducing CPU stress? Options

[Katatsumuri]

Hello. Hope to find an answer to this little problem of mine.
I sometimes run Ableton Live 8.2 on a Samsung laptop (windows 8 64bit). When playing above around 10 tracks with effects ecc (without "freezing" them) the CPU load indicator tends to go over 100% and everything is messed up. The bottleneck of this computer is clearly the CPU: it's and AMD A6 4455 "trinity"(dual core). It's clearly not a great processor but it's still brand new and I thought it could handle some more stress by Ableton.
Now, my question is:

Would an external sound card help taking off some CPU stress when processing audio? (Maybe dedicated drivers instead of Asio4all might help?)

In that case, what kind of external sound card should I buy? (I'd like to buy one anyways)

Thank you in advance.

PS: sorry about my goofy english!

[yourlord]

You have some other issue.. That CPU should barely break a sweat with just about anything you're trying to do there..

I used to run Ardour with often 25+ simultaneous tracks, plus several effects in the loop for each track, feeding into Jamin via Jack for overall mastering.. All on a single core Pentium 4 3.2GHz with 4GB of ram playing back through onboard AC97 audio... What you have destroys that chip in raw performance.

[dhromed]

You have some other issue.. That CPU should barely break a sweat with just about anything you're trying to do there..[...] All on a single core Pentium 4 3.2GHz with 4GB of ram playing back through onboard AC97 audio... What you have destroys that chip in raw performance.

Pretty much any desktop CPU will smoke the kind of energy-efficient CPUs meant for light laptops, like the A6. The plain Hz numbers don't mean anything without knowing the class and intent of the CPU.

[washu]

Pretty much any desktop CPU will smoke the kind of energy-efficient CPUs meant for light laptops, like the A6. The plain Hz numbers don't mean anything without knowing the class and intent of the CPU.

So you would happily take a desktop Pentium 2 over an i7-3940XM?

What you just said makes no sense at all. There is a huge performance difference between a P4 and an AMD Trinity chip. A P4 is not even in the same league as Trinity, even a lower clocked mobile version. That A6 chip will handedly "smoke" a P4 3.2 GHz and not even break a sweat doing it.