Aureal
Vortex2 SQ2500 Quad PCI review
Posted by Adam
Klein on February 15, 2000 - Page 4/5
Company: Aureal
Product: Vortex2
SQ2500 Quad PCI soundcard
More
Features
The
digital output offers the option to use much higher quality
and higher frequency outputs. With the SQ2500, you have the
option to use 48KHz as an output from the digital connector.
I
don’t have digital speakers, so I didn’t get a chance to
check out this feature. Of course, the board has a MIDI/Gameport
connection and it does work flawlessly with the controllers
I plugged into them, just as it should.
The
onboard coaxial S/PDIF output is a nice addition to this
board. With other boards, you had to get a daughter card in
order to have this feature. With this new Aureal Vortex 2
SQ2500, you get a signal to noise ratio of >98dB, which
is slightly better than the previous SuperQuad.
Audio
Performance
This
is the area where the SQ2500 shines. With its newly improved
audio processor it can create the same audio quality that
the previous Vortex 2 does. It is also able to do it with a
lot less CPU use. It’s not all about CPU utilization
though.
The
3D audio the Vortex chip produces is really good and is well
worth the cost of some CPU cycles. Just for a little
comparison, I took the older Aureal SuperQuad and benched it
against the Sound Blaster Live and the new Vortex 2 SQ2500.
I
choose to run a test that just tests normal sound generation
with a program that you can really see the difference in.
That’s why I choose old Quake 2. When you get over 200
fps, it’s really easy to tell the difference in the
results in 640x480 resolution. The sound setting was set to
high quality, so that 22KHz sound was being produced.
First, my system specs:
- Abit
BE6-II
- Pentium
III 500E @ 715MHz
- 256MB of
Siemens 8ns SDRAM @ 143MHz
- Creative
Labs Annihilator Pro
- Western
Digital 27.3 ATA66 HD
In
my previous review of the SuperQuad, I noticed a 3%
difference between the Sound Blaster Live and the SuperQuad,
with the SB Live leading. With new drivers the difference is
like 2%, but with the SB Live still in the lead. Now, here
comes the good part, the SQ2500 blew the both of them out of
the water.
Aureal
Vortex 2 SuperQuad:
198.7
Aureal
Vortex 2 SQ2500:
207.6
Sound
Blaster Live:
203.1
The
SQ2500 was 2% faster than the SB Live and almost 5% faster
than the original SuperQuad. These frame rates may not seem
like much to some of your, but in sound card land the
small differences do matter.
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