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!

[RonaldDumsfeld]

Ableton was a fantastic piece of software when it first came out but it's old now. It doesn't make much use of multi cores for example. They are duppodrd to be doing a new version which I understand is practically a rewrite.

These are the official system requirements. So you ought not to have a problem.

Windows: 2 GHz Pentium® 4 or Celeron® compatible CPU or faster (multicore CPU recommended), 2 GB RAM (4 GB recommended on Windows Vista and Windows 7), Windows XP (home or Pro), Windows Vista or Windows 7, sound card (ASIO driver support recommended), DVD-ROM drive, QuickTime recommended

Either way, if you have an expensive software tool such as Ableton you really owe it to yourself to get hold of a multi-channel audio interface. If you don't have one already I think it must be difficult because if you cannot hear the incoming cue track before it hits the main outs you are going to risk getting train wrecks on a regular basis.

Contrary to what someone has previously suggested many audio interface type of soundcards do have DSP processing carried out by a special chip on the device. I have a MOTU Ultralite and it has reverb, 2 compressors and 7 parametric EQs which can be applied to any of the I/O channels(10i+14o) and mix busses (8) simultaneously. Other manufacturers offer similar suites. RME and Focusrite do for sure. Of course this will not take the load off Ableton directly but there is scope to add effects. You could also use the inserts or a spare channel pair to add external effects if you wanted.

I started out with Ableton and Traktor with an M-Audio Fast Track Pro. About $200. You can find alternatives from the likes of E-MU, Berhinger, Native Instruments and ART among others. Some are ven less expensive.

The gold standard, if you can afford it, is the RME Babyface @~$550.

MOTU, TC-Konnekt, Presonus, among others have offerings at intermediate prices. I like the look of this one atm. Focusrite Scarlet 8i6 @~$300.