Well, I figured out that the culprit to my xrun problem wasn't my 533mghz
processor, its my envy24 chipset based card, from the alsa wiki:
"Many but not all users complain about sound glitches. This may be due to
the cards being IRQ hungry. (VU meter interface?) -- Tobiah"
Given that the evil envy24 chip is in a lot of cards out there, I'm
wondering what cards people have had better results with?
http://www.brianredfern.org