CPU problems

[bassbum]

I working on some tracks in Live 8 and im starting to get close to my CPU limmit. I was wondering what I could I to stop this? I thought about upgrading my sound card because I thought it had like a CPU of its own for prossesing sound but when I looked online I couldnt find any infomation on it, for any sound card I looked at. Do sound cards have there own cpu and ram things ?????

I'v heard you can get external cards for prossesing audio FXs and thing. Is that just for pro tools?

I dont realy have the money for a new processor and I have looked at cooling but I dont realy understand it. Is it as simple as buying a fan and then increaseing the clock speed?
I have a i5 650 and a Realtek ALC888S sound card, if thats any help.

[ComfiStile]

Have you tried software fixes to your cpu usage?

Sampling synths with high cpu usage and such?

[ToxicBass]

Your CPU's more than sufficient. This business of the CPU and soundcard thing, the CPU is on the motherboard not the soundcard.
You could try resampling as already said if you have lots of high cpu usage effects/vst's and increase the latency time.
Also search for 'overclocking', you change your clock speed on your CPU to a faster than stock speed which generates more heat so hence you need to cool it more with a new CPU heatsink/cooler. You may need to work with voltages in the Bias and if your not careful you will destroy your CPU and it will be very costly. You really shouldn't need to overclock and you'd be doing so at your own risk.

[looney]

delete everything in the project that you aren't using, such as plugins that aren't doing anything or empty instrument channels you've abandoned. they all take up cpu load!

certain plugins can be extremely cpu-heavy so try to see if there's one in particular that's hogging up your cpu time

once you're satisfied with the way an individual track sounds, "flatten" it, which converts it to wav and significantly cuts down on your cpu load. remember though that you won't be able to futz around with the audio once it's flattened

in ableton you can also "freeze" tracks which is similar to flattening but with the added advantage of being able to unfreeze them later (however you're still going to lose some information when they're unfrozen)

[Electric_Head]

Looney had it pretty spot on.
Export your tracks as wav and freeze the vst to free up mem.
Try to keep instances of heavy vsts to a minimum.

How much mem do you have?
An i5 will def handle what you`re trying to achieve.