I thought that possibly having a soundcard would enable me to reduce latency from having a big project loaded with lots of plugins and about 50 channels, but it seems the best solution is to switch from Ableton (32 bit, meaning it can only utilise up to about 2gig RAM) to Cubase 6 (64 bit and the best SAW from what I read) or Logic (seeing as I'm a MacBook Pro user, using an Apple DAW would mean less crashes etc.), and/or have my plugin presets sitting on an external hard drive. I am very interested in UAD's external plugin harddrive. Check out this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q92kCvRjuc0
Stepchild, next time I'm on Ableton I'll have a look at the audio properties.
I wish Ableton would just hurry up and release Live 9 which will be 64 bit, but Live 8 crashes on me about 10 times a day as my projects typically have about 50 tracks with many 3rd party plugins. Live 8 came out almost 3 years ago.