Soundcard Roundup Part 1

[DiscoStu]

I had been looking forward to christening this topic, but someone beat me to it.

http://www.radiativenz.com/reviews/soundcardroundup/index.shtml

Questions/Comments......

[Ragnor]

Always good to see more RadiativeNZ reviews...

Bit weird having a soundcard roundup without Creative and Philips cards.. they are higher end though.

I assume that's gonna be part II..?

[KingJackal]

Dude - do you think it would be possible to update that with other cards, reviewed by OTHER PEOPLE? :confused:
( bear with me )

I know RB/Whetu etc have Philips, I've got a Gametheatre XP, Hans etc have LIVE!s, SSnake etc have LIVE! 5.1s, and JB has Audigy's.

Do you think that could work? Cos if it did, you'd have about the whole market lined up! :) Which would give the roundup a lot of clout! ;)

[Ragnor]

I think the roundup should just be done by the one reviewer, I'm sure there will be more cards reviewed in part II..

Then perhaps a seperate article or database of user/owner reviews.. but then someone has to put it all together, maintain it... etc etc

I've got retail Acoustic Edge too, plus an oem Sound blaster live 5.1

And of course this dead sound blaster live (that is just begging to be smashed with a sledgehammer, doused in lighter fuel and ignited)...

[Geek4Life]

whetu and H2gO Flasher have been planning on doing a combined review of the AE. But they can't have got a round to it yet.

/edit spelling, and what has happened to H2gO Flasher. Has he disappeared.?

[DiscoStu]

Yeah - this is just part 1, so I've got something to show before my exams.

Most of the bases will hopefully be covered by the end of it (I have my contacts ;) )

The idea of having multiple people participating sort of defeats the purpose of the comparison.......doesn't it :confused:

If you have everyone voicing their views on one card, it doesn't really help someone decided between cards, as they aren't really compared. Also people tend to be a little one eyed about their own hardware and tend to justify why theirs is the most l337.

[Ragnor]

Look everyone knows my Acoustic Edge is the best...;)

[KingJackal]

That would normally be true...

BUT

If I'm reading correctly, the purpose of the review is to find out what does work, what doesn't work and what half works in Windows XP.

User opinion is irrelevant for that.

I boot into ME, and try everything. Tick boxes.
I boot into XP, again try everthing. Tick boxes.

Yes, the Quake3 benchmarks and the CPU utilisation graphs won't be able to be reproduced accurately, but you WOULD be able to source a huge sample of cards for XP compatibility testing. And going by your opening statments, that's exactly what you're trying to do.... :confused: :confused:

[Solid Snake]

Yup, .. I could help do that.

Acoustic Edge IS good ... but CPU utlization is too high for me. Even though not enough to dig into fps... I wanna get the best fps I can, so I think I may do with a GTXP myself.