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Mad Dog Multimedia Entertainer 7.1 DSP Soundcard

Audio/Others by nobraine @ 2003-11-21

VIA?s Envy24HT-S chip is powering some new soundcards out there, we take a look at its features and see how it performs when put it up against a Hercules Fortissimo III 7.1 / SoundBlaster Live 5.1 and nVidia's Soundstorm.

Benchmarks

Next the benchmarks:

We choose benchmarks in which sound is used to check performance alteration because of the different soundcards/sound chips. Those benchmarks where:

Futuremark 3D Mark 2003 ( version 3.3.0 )

Quake III with the latest point release

X2-RollingDemo

The test system was the following:

nobraine's Test Setup
CPU	AMD Athlon "c" 1.4Ghz
Mainboard	Abit NF7-S
Memory	2 * 512Mb PC3200 TwinMos
Video	ATI Radeon 8500 64Mb

In this benchmark the Soundblaster Live 5.1 clearly leads the race followed by the nVidia's soundstorm chip.

Madshrimps (c)

Where as in the 640x480 benchmark there was a relatively big difference, 8 fps between the highest and the lowest score, this difference isn't there anymore with the 1600x1200 benchmark, the results are almost identically.

Madshrimps (c)

With the 3D mark 2003 benchmark, the results varied from 1097 for the SoundBlaster Live 5.1 to 1129 for the Hercules Fortissimo III 7.1 which is not a gigantic difference, but illustrates nicely how the cards affect system performance

Nice detail with this benchmark was that the standard windows drivers for my SoundBlaster Live 5.1 where not good enough for 3D mark 3002, they made it crash, feel free to look at the nice screenshot.

Madshrimps (c)

In this benchmark you see quite a difference between the cards, well more between the Entertainer 7.1 DSP and the other cards 5 fps on a total of 40 fps is quite a lot.

All information and graphics contained in Madshrimps are sole property of the Madshrimps crew and may not be reproduced or copied in any manner without written permission from us.