If sound is killing your performance then that means your CPU is right there on the line of supporting playable framerates, but just not quite enough.
Make sure you are not trying to run LLE audio. Then try lowering the sample rate, try the other audio backends and see if some combination will help lessen the performance hit.
Failing that you coukd attempt to see if you can lighten the background processes your computer is doing while dolphin is running and any other performance tuning that you feel is justified. Or you can play with no sound on games that push your hardware a little too close to the limit.
Make sure you are not trying to run LLE audio. Then try lowering the sample rate, try the other audio backends and see if some combination will help lessen the performance hit.
Failing that you coukd attempt to see if you can lighten the background processes your computer is doing while dolphin is running and any other performance tuning that you feel is justified. Or you can play with no sound on games that push your hardware a little too close to the limit.