Myoelectric control with surface EMG signal has achieved great success in clinics, but only limited to the control of 2-Degrees-of-freedom prosthesis. With the appearance of multiple-channel and high-density EMG system and the advances of pattern recognition technology, it becomes possible to control a multi-degree smart prosthesis using EMG signals. However, it requires high performance EMG systems with high sampling frequency, which impedes the popularity of EMG-based applications. This study aims to explore a way to reduce the cost of EMG system by investigating the effect of sampling rate on gesture recognition accuracy. Two groups of experiments on inner-group and cross-group were designed to evaluate the classification accuracy at different EMG sampling frequency. In comparison with the sampling frequency at 1kHz, a lower sampling frequency at 400 Hz could achieve comparable accuracy, reduced by only 0.43% (KNN) and 0.83% (SVM) with the overall accuracy at 99.40% and 98.67%, respectively. It implies that appropriate reduction of the sampling frequency can be a good choice to balance the cost and performance of a multiple channel EMG system for feature-based hand gesture classification.