What say Us?
Sound
High Quality sound is guaranteed with more than 93dB SNR for the 18-bit Digital to
Analogue Converter. Who says PC audio is noisy?! Hook this up to your hi-fi and blast the
volume to full (mute all the unused inputs of course, and mic; without playing anything),
and compare the 'hiss' to any ISA card. You'll be amazed by the difference (and noise
you've been hearing to in those days of ISA). WARNING: This test may cause damage to your
equipment (hi-fi) - so don't blame me if anything happens to it ok. Don't say I didn't
warn ya!
However, you are unable to connect direct to passive speakers or headphones 'cos
there's no power amplifier built-in. Well you don't have to worry 'bout this one if you
have a hifi system or active speakers hooked on.
New games have upgraded the sound quality tremendously, now with full stereo or
surround sound tracks and sampling rates that brings it a little closer to hi-fi.
A word of advice; For best effect, pls throw away your small tiny PC speakers, and get
yourself a decent satellite/subwoofer system from the wide range of brands available.
Wavetable quality is surprisingly good. Hear the sample here.
Compatibility
As time goes by, compatibility gets better and better. And
with Win95 games, you really don't run into severe problems. And face it - DOS is dead!
And I don't really give a rat's ass about DOS compatibility.
Driver installation
Driver installation is a breeze. Put in the card, browse the
CD to get to the english part is everything else is pretty standard, with the demo
programs installed and everything.
Driver upgrading is easy as well, just remove the PCI338
drivers from the Add/Remove in Control Panel, reboot, and repeat the above.
I have no problems so far, I dunno about others...
But I have some problems if I leave these drivers while installing a Vortex2 card. You'd
have to uninstall the drivers beforehand.
Recommendations
Yup this card gets almost 5 stars (0.5 star away). Sound
reproduction is crisp and clear. A3D effects are pretty good (The surround effect is not
as excellent as they claim it to be, but good enough), although it's being processed by
the CPU. One cool feature - no thunderous 'pop' at power on or off !!
