regardless, a decent USB box with ASIO drivers can produce some unexpectedly good results on shit hardware! Generally with such a box, I find CPU utilisation levels during recording to be about 5-15% over what they would be otherwise on a dodgy consumer-grade PCI* connected soundcard , but the latency is still sufficiently low to be able to shred (to say hemidemisemiquavers at 140+bpm) on guitar listening only to the output from a VST plugin, done in realtime, while recording.

ASIO drivers are fantastic.