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While it's pretty easy to purchase a cheap PCI sound card these days (boards like the Sound Blaster PCI128, Aureal Vortex series, Yamaha YMF based cards, etc), do keep in mind that the problems with such hardware is that they offer a limited feature set, mediocre 3D audio acceleration and generally don't sound as good as more expensive sound cards on the market.
65% Rating: 
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Analog Devices SoundMAX-SPX |
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More Benchmarks and Conclusions
In order to take into consideration the CPU overhead in all possible gaming
conditions, we turned to Ziff Davis' Audio Winbench 99.
These
performance charts indicate that SoundMAX with SPX technologies creates a
considerable CPU load as voice counts increase. But we must not forget that most
games rarely use 32 or even 16 voices and that our reference processor is
low end. In actual gaming conditions and on systems with higher clocked
processors, the difference between SoundMAX and other PCI based solutions is
quite smaller than what Ziff Davis Audio Winbench 99 results
represent.
Conclusions
Before we started our first SoundMAX
article, we had are reservations about this solution competing against
mainstream PCI sound cards. During the tests, SoundMAX with SPX performed
superbly. SoundMAX with SPX drivers offer features found only on medium to high
priced PCI sound cards for all known operating systems. Output quality is a bit
lower than medium priced sound cards but definitely out classes other AC97
solutions out there. SoundMAX can definitely drive well enough a PC speaker set
of any price.
With SoundMAX with SPX, OEMs will be able offer 6 channel
output and features found only in expensive sound cards at a substantially lower
cost. Driver support is complete even for operating system like Linux and all
known Windows versions.
SoundMAX with SPX can be the basic 2 channel
integrated sound found on a motherboard or a multi channel solution through the
use of CNR riser cards.
As of now, only
Intel motherboards with the AD1885 codec can offer SoundMAX with SPX. Six
months later, we should be able to see it in other motherboards as well. In any
case, consumers get much more than what they paid
for.
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