So, you are ready for a fresh sound card in the recent Year and you need something good. You play a plenty of games with 3D positional sound, so our recommendation of the Acoustic and Seismic Edge for II channel digital out is no good. You have read our Hercules round-up and determined that while they are good, you are willing to expend more but the exotic prosumer cards from Terratec or M-Audio are out of your rate. This leaves only 2 high-end gaming sound cards left: the Innocative Labs Audigy II and the NVIDIA nForce2 MCP with SoundStorm.


The Audigy 2 Platinum is the flagship artefact from Creative Labs. Sporting 24/192 DACs on all six channels and accurate 24/96 analog playback and recording, the Audigy 2 is the gaming complete agenda that comes abutting to the prosumer complete cards. 64 3D positional audio channels are accelerated in accouterments and tweaked through EAX

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Advanced HD. The Audigy Drive completes the amalgamation for advanced I/O for your system. As a media processor, two 6-pin IEEE-1394 ports are additionally included.


The analogously nForce2 belvedere represents NVIDIA’s flagship belvedere processor. It additionally promises 64 accouterments accelerated 3D audio streams, but claims to abutment 256 2D audio streams. Behind this processing ability is Sensaura’s HRTF algorithms for positional 3D audio, advised by abounding to be the advertence standard. Indeed, Microsoft considers the nForce MCP as the advertence DirectX8 audio setup.


With its roots in the Xbox, the nForce2 SoundStorm appearance real-time Dolby Digital Interactive Content Encoding. Dolby Digital ICE is absolute to NVIDIA at the moment back no added architect has put the engineering accomplishment to attempt with NVIDIA at this level. Just like the Audigy 2, the nForce2 appearance IEEE-1394 connectivity. Our ASUS A7N8X one ups the Audigy 2 by alms a 4-pin Firewire adapter for greater flexibility. Oh yeah, one added thing: The $150 nForce2 happens to accommodate an ATA133 controller, USB 2.0 controllers, an AGP8X slot, and the world’s fastest dual-channel DDR AMD SocketA interface.