Great cheap soundcard, now with linux support :)
Written: Jan 12 '00 (Updated Apr 16 '00)
|
Product Rating:
|
|
|
Pros: Quality, price
Cons: Outdated feature set (No A3D 2.0), better cards available for a little more
|
|
|
| clicq's Full Review: Turtle Beach Montego A3DXstream |
I got this card several months ago when it went on sale at CompUSA. It is one of the best purchases I have for my computer. It replaced a really old Sound Blaster 16.
The sound quality is very good. This card was noticeably quieter (as in less static) than my old SB16. I listen to mp3s a lot and I am able to tell the difference. It is supposed to be close to a professional quality card. But, the MIDI on this card kind of sucks. It's ok, but it's not as good as say, the Sound Blaster Live!. Also, it can only do 32 voices in hardware, the other 32 are in software.
It has a good feature set for the price. One thing I especially like is its ability to play multiple sound streams at once. What does this mean? It means I can play mp3s, hear AIM and ICQ sounds, and play a game, all at the same time. Also, this card does some sound acceleration, meaning it takes some load off the processor. It also supports A3D 1.0 and some of 2.0 which most games now support. However, I haven't been able to tell the "3d sound". There are a few features missing from this card for hardcore gamers, mainly the lack of full A3D 2.0 support and the lack of 4 speaker support. However, since the card was only $30, I'm not complaining.
This card was easy to install, plug and play took care of everything. One thing I don't like about Turtle Beach is that they are slow to release drivers. For example, the latest driver from Aureal for this chip was released in November 1999, but Turtle Beach, as of January 2000, still had not brought their drivers up to the latest version. So, I'm using the Aureal reference drivers. Another important thing to note is the lack of linux support. Linux doesn't support the Aureal Vortex 1 chip, which is what this card uses, because Aureal won't release enough info. So, no sound in Linux :(. But, I heard that Aureal is going to open source their drivers sometime.
Also, it works in Windows 2000 (using drivers included in Windows 2000).
If you can get this card for cheap, I'd say go for it. It's a solid card. But, I would recommend spending a little more to buy a newer sound card that has A3d 2.0 support. There are lots of good cards around $50, I would probably get one of those instead. If I had a choice, I would rather get an SB Live Value! than this card if they were the same price. But for the money, it's a darn good value.
UPDATE: Now Aureal has released binary only linux drivers. So now it works in linux. Also, in case you need to know, this card is based on Aureal's 8820 chip (Vortex 1).
Also, at this time, there really is no reason to get this card anymore. For $30, you can get a bunch of other cards (Now you can get a Montego 2!). So I am no longer recommending this card. You can do better now.
Recommended:
No
Amount Paid (US$): 30
|
|
|
|
Epinions.com ID:
clicq
|
|
Reviews written: 54
Trusted by: 4 members
|
|
|
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.