It's true that Creative soundcards aren't a favorite among diehards, but it doesn't mean you can't make music using one. I started with an AWE32 for Chrissakes.
Anyway, latency is a function of the card's drivers and, of course, your latency settings in CW. The lowest latency you can achieve is directly proportional to your cpu speed, however, so a faster cpu usually means lower latency times depending on track count loading. The lag you're experiencing is recording and playback latency; in effect, you think you are recording on time but the sound is already coming out delayed from your soundcard, add to that the recording latency and the lag becomes noticeable. One thing you should do is to turn off input monitoring in Pro Audio and to adjust latency to the lowest your pc can accomodate. You will know you've reached that limit when audio playback begins to crackle.
Another way is to use alternative drivers. The links I posted above give better performance than the stock creative drivers. I prefer the kx drivers (very low latencies in comparison), but it can be a bit technical - read up very well on the included readme files.
The 3rd thing to do is hardware monitoring, but I can't recall if the Audigy ever supported that.
