Realtek AC'97 laggy sound

Cathineal

First off, bear with me as i'm not really a computer mastermind.

I've been having trouble with Half-Life 2 and it crashing pretty much all the damn time. I spend more time connecting to servers than i do playing. So i figured i'd try updating my drivers.

Specs:
Video: nVIDIA 7900 GTX (evga)
Mobo: Abit AN8 Fatal1ty
CPU: AMD Opteron 144
Sound: Realtek AC'97 (came with mobo)

not sure what else is necessary..

so i update my video card drivers exactly as instructed by Driver Cleaner... first in add/remove, then boot to safemode and run DC, then back to windows and install drivers. (ran cab cleaner and all that with it) When i reboot again after the video drivers (which are the nVIDIA beta 91.xx drivers, updated from the 84.xx drivers) my sound is all crappy. It sounds really low quality and sounds like it lags. I don't really know how to accuratley describe it. But its irritating as hell. After going through a few forums and such, it seems that this Realtek AC'97 card is a bit of a peice of crap. However, i only have problems with it when i update drivers, and even then it seems to just randomly fix itself. Either that, or i have no idea what i did last time to fix it, but i aboslutly remember this happening.

Any ideas/suggestions? I'm saving up for a music festival coming up in Bushnell, IL soon, and tickets alone are $125 at the gate, not to mention over-priced food, gas driving there, and all that... so if buying a new card is the answer, any suggestions for a good relatively cheap card?


ed: ack, newb move.... wrong forum. I just noticed there's an audio forum. Somehow that slipped by me before. Anyone able to kindly move this thread to its proper home?