[Chernobyl]

A lot of people are suggesting SBLive but with all the posts about SBLive i was wondering if anyone had tried an MX400?

[Wolf87]

S3 closed down their Diamond division and ESS Technology, developers of the Canyon3D chipset blocked access to Taiwan FTP site.
The MX400 shall have no better drivers than their presently incomplete Win 2000 drivers.

The Guillemot Fortissimo is cheap but not so good in 3D and Terratec DX cards cost $200.

The Voyetra-Turtle Beach Santa Cruz ($99) with a Crystal Digital Signal Processor has good drivers with Sensaura 3D, fine Midi, hardware MP3 and SP-DIF connectors. Since it is programmable, like the SB Live, driver revisions may bring new functions.

[SmallPileofGibs]

I'm considering the santa cruz.. but the only win2k drivers available are 'beta'... and I haven't seen any reports of how well they work...

[Chernobyl]

I tested out a SoundBlaster Live with Digital Out on Friday last week and have found none of the problems others have mentioned. and there were REAL drivers for it.

Quote:

Originally posted by SmallPileofGibs:
[b]I'm considering the santa cruz.. but the only win2k drivers available are 'beta'... and I haven't seen any reports of how well they work...

[tourettes]

I still have not dicided what sound card should I use on Abit KT133. My old Aureal I based Sonic Impact S90 didn't work a bit.

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---- Parasoul ----
http://rasta.cult.tpu.fi/~parasoul/

[Wolf87]

I have been using the Santa Cruz for three days and the Windows 2000 Beta drivers are superb.

Midi and Mp3 sound better than SB Live. Directsound implementation is good. 3D sound with headphones is superior. Eax 1 and 2 are ok and solid but there seems to be a memory leak in Aureal 1 driver within the game Freespace 2.

The Santa Cruz performs better than SB Live.

[Chernobyl]

May have a point on quality but in all reality i think it comes down to what you do. If you are using it for Games mainly then SB is fine and they have REAL W2K Drivers. Santa Cruz - for the price (In Australia at least the Cruz is almost twice the price of the SB Live Digital Out i got) is not that much better in my opinion unless you do a lot of work with music (MP3 Creation Mixing etc). I think either card is fine - My SBLive is also working fine on my KT133Raid running my 650Duron at 950 so as far as overclocking goes i know the SB works fine. (I ran looping demo of utbench with UT set to 1024*768*32bit with all textures set to high and Hardware 3D Accel of Sound and high sound quality with no lock ups for 18.5 Hours.

Quote:

Originally posted by Wolf87:
[b]I have been using the Santa Cruz for three days and the Windows 2000 Beta drivers are superb.

Midi and Mp3 sound better than SB Live. Directsound implementation is good. 3D sound with headphones is superior. Eax 1 and 2 are ok and solid but there seems to be a memory leak in Aureal 1 driver within the game Freespace 2.

The Santa Cruz performs better than SB Live.

[Down8]

I swear I've been there before...

Does Santa Cruz have a web site?

thanks,
-bZj

[tourettes]

My SB16 did blew up, so it's time to buy a new one. Still no idea wich one

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---- Parasoul ----
http://rasta.cult.tpu.fi/~parasoul/

[Wolf87]

Videologic Sonic Fury and Voyetra Turtle Beach Santa Cruz are the same card:
http://www.videologic.com/ProductInfo/SonicFury.htm
http://www.voyetra-turtle-beach.com/site/products/santacru/

Videologic offers a lot of bonus software, including Yamaha Softsync XG.

A superior card for users of headphones and for DVD playback. It uses downloadable samples (DLS) and not soundfonts (SF2).

[moray]

I have the Turtle beach Montego card running under NT4 and am about to upgrade to Win2k. I suspect that the Montego does not run under Win2k, but I will find out soon enough.

Can anyone tell me if the Videologic SonicFury (i.e. Turtle Beach Santa Cruz) ships with win2k drivers on CD?

I can see that they are available for download from the website, but at 24Mb I am not interested in spending half a day online to pull them.

Thanks

[Mike Zamarocy]

Some of you keep saying tha the SB Live! has REAL drivers for Win2000, and that is somewhat true. But I have read on the CL newsgroups that there is no HARDWARE EAX yet in Win2000, only software emulation. Also something about no WDM drivers yet for the Live! card. But I did see that the VTB Santa Cruz DOES have WDM drivers in its Beta set. Does that mean it has HARDWARE 3D then???

[JediBaron]

No way, guys!
If your's going to go for a kick @ss soundcard go for the Acoustic Edge card. It rocks and has excellent out-of-the-box Win2k drivers. It's a little bit slower than the Live card (8% processor usage compaired to 5%), but is not plagued by all of Creative's massive problems. It also has EAX 1.0 & 2.0 and A3D 1.0 (no A3D 2.0, but that may change with later drivers. I personally have my doubts because Creative will more than likely drop all developement support for it now that they own A3D)
It even comes in 3 versions: The 2 speaker output one is $50 the 4.1 version is $75 and the 5.1 version is $100.

[GHackmann]

3D Sound Surge has a nice review of the Philips Acoustic Edge up at http://www.3dss.com/reviews/AcousticEdge/AcousticEdge.html
which compares the Acoustic Edge with the SB Live! and Santa Cruz. They test both the Win98 and Win2K drivers. Hope this helps.