Price Paid:  $60.00 from compucenter

Summary:
When I bought this card I thought it would be quite good since it supported EAX and A3D. I was preatty dissapointed for one I couldn't use headphones it is unpowered so all you will get is a light fuzz. Another is that alot of games didn't support it in fact it's almost the like every game was this card's mortal enemy. Close to every game screwed up with this card in some way it would always do somthing really odd and you ended up going into control panel to change multiple settings to be able to hear anything. EAX was either not there or it was screwing up badly (by the way this was with the newest drivers). The software package was bad too they had a CD for a program called Acid DJ it required a serial number that they didn't include. This has got to be one of the worst sound cards in existance.

Summary:
At 50 bucks I saw that this midget of a soundcard had an optical digital output. Immediately, since my Soundblaster Live X-Gamer did not have an optical digital out out of the box, I decided to give this little wonder a shot. It is tiny. When you slide this sucker out of the package you will know what I mean. It is just large enough to fit in a PCI slot. Wow!!! It supports full 4 speaker 3D surround. I was already aware that this card could support the audio standards Auriel 3D 1.0 and EAX 1.0 but I found a driver update at Guillemot.com that enabled EAX 2.0 and support for 32 audio streams. That is the same EAX 2.0 available on the Soundblaster Live cards. How about that for a pleasant surprise? It also has its own special 3D Sensaura surround sound. Actually, I'm not so sure what that actually does but it sure has a catchy name. As far as any technical detail about what that does I am stumped. The important thing is that it is there. At 50 bucks this card kicks some booty and wants more than the average setup to stretch its legs. I gave it just that.

By the way, I didn't remove my Soundblaster Live X-Gamer from my system. This card works great as a second option and a second analog to digital converter and vice versa. To get multiple PCI soundcards to work in just about any system with enough PCI slots and Windows 98 just be sure to disable the gameport on your original soundcard to avoid conflicts. To do that click on my computer, then control panel, and then click on the system icon in the control panel. Then click on device manager. Find your gameport driver and disable it in the hardware profile. My system wouldn't load windows unless I did. In the control panel click on multimedia to get to where you switch your sound cards. I'm not sure if using multiple sound cards works as well in Windows 95.