Diamond Monster Sound MX400
by Mike Andrawes on January 27, 2000 2:08 AM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Mobile
The Test
Windows 98 SE Test System |
|
Hardware |
|
CPU(s) |
Intel Pentium III 550E |
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 |
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) |
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.
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