To answer Shodan486's question, IMHO,
1. When it comes to a 386 and 486 system, it's best to avoid any PCI based sound cards. Most, if not all PCI cards depend on some sort of emulation to conform to Sound Blaster et al standards. Emulation takes up CPU power. Furthermore, avoid mixing DOS games in native/pure mode and PCI sound cards, if at all possible.
2. ISA-based sound cards are best for DOS games for a system which has ISA slots.
3. The original Sound Blaster 1.5, 2.0, Pro, Pro2 and non-PnP Sound Blaster 16 cards are good candidates. All these do not require any software loading except for the SET BLASTER (and maybe SET SOUND for some games) statement in the Autoexec.bat file. Some of the DOS games do not even require this statement to be present in the environment. These games access the sound cards directly at either IRQ7 or IRQ5, or selectable via the game's setup.
The PnP cards do not require additional CPU resources; PnP software just initializes the card, but I don't like the idea of software enabling a sound card in an old machine.
4. I don't think games designed during the 386/486-era suffer from a sound card utilizing system resources. Do they? These games depend on raw CPU power, rather than getting affected by sound cards getting their share from CPU workload.
On the other hand, yes, newer Windows-era games are affected where much frames-per-second numbers are vital in benchmarking, and there are too many event-dependent sound effects and music coming into play.
I do not have enough experiences when it comes to other cards like the GUS, but so far, Creative's SB 1.5, Pro and 16 are nice.
BTW., I'm using a CT2760 SBAWE32 with LAPC-I card in my 486 currently.
I prefer to play DOOM, DESCENT, HERETIC and other DOS FPS games in my Pentium 133 and P II 400 based machines.