The Test

Windows 98 SE Test System

Hardware

CPU(s)

Intel Pentium III 550E
Intel Celeron 300A

Provided by Memman

Motherboard ABIT BE6
Memory

128MB PC133 Corsair SDRAM

Hard Drive

Western Digital Expert 418000 - UltraATA/66

CDROM

Toshiba 16X EIDE CD-ROM

Video Card

NVIDIA GeForce 32MB SDR AGP (default clock - 120/166)

Sound Cards

Diamond Monster Sound MX400
Aureal SQ2500 Vortex2
Creative Sound Blaster Live! Platinum

Software

Operating System

Windows 98 SE

Audio Drivers
Diamond MX400 4.07.00.2004
Aureal Vortex2 4.06.2041 Reference Driver
Creative SBLive! 11/99
Video Driver

NVIDIA Detonator 3.68 Reference Driver

Benchmarking Applications

Synthetic
ZDBop Audio Winbench 99
Gaming

Quake 3 Arena 1.11 (OpenGL)
Unreal Tournament v400 (Direct3D)
Half-Life 1.0.1.3 (OpenGL)

ZDBop Audio Winbench 99 Performance

Synthetic benchmarks using Ziff Davis' Audio Winbench 99 show both the Aureal SQ2500 Vortex2 and the Creative Sound Blaster Live! offer virtually 0% CPU utilization (maximum of 1.5%) for up to 32 DirectSound3D sound streams. On the other hand, the Diamond Monster Sound MX400 does take a bit more CPU power, up to 7% in some cases.

Of course, we all know that synthetic benchmarks do not tell the whole story and Audio Winbench 99 is an especially bad case of this. The streams of audio it sends do not really require any processing by the host CPU or even the sound card. It's almost like a theoretical throughput benchmark. The fact that Monster Sound MX400 took more CPU power is not promising, but it should still be taken with a grain of salt.

What you will see next is that with 3D sound disabled, these PCI audio solutions perform almost identically.

ESS Canyon3D & Sensaura Technology Q3 P3/550 Performance
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