Great card at a great price now.
Written: May 14 '01
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Great sound, hard to beat 4-way surround sound at $25.
Cons: It's a bit temperamental at times...
The Bottom Line: If you see it in a store and want kicking sound for a kicking price, buy it!
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| jsc1973's Full Review: Turtle Beach Montego II Quadzilla |
I bought this card in April of 2000 for $89, but I didn't regret it then and I don't regret it now, when you can get the Quadzilla for $25-30. It's just as good now as it was then.
Someone said it requires two IRQs, and that's true with the stock drivers. But on the Turtle Beach website, you can download a newer driver that gives you back an IRQ in exchange for ditching SoundBlaster emulation (which you only need in certain older games). So that resource problem is solved.
The sound it produces is great; Aureal, who made the chipset, is out of business now but not because they made bad products. I rigged two Creative PC Works speaker sets to mine and it kicks butt. The MIDI support isn't all that good, but that's the only real drawback. The sound in games is out of this world and so is MP3 playback.
There have been reports of problems with AMD's newest CPUs, but I've built Athlon systems with it before and never had trouble. My home system is a K6-III+ and it plays nice with the Quadzilla too. The only drawback is that there are several control panel settings in Windows that you'll have to set to enable four-way surround sound, and every other month, Windows for some reason has messed them up. That's Microsoft's fault and not TB's, but it is annoying.
This card is still worth the $89 I paid a year ago, but TB has the Santa Cruz out now and lowered the price on their old cards. At $25-30, this is a steal compared to other cards in that price range.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 89
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Epinions.com ID:
jsc1973
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Member: John
Location: Raleigh NC
Reviews written: 36
Trusted by: 6 members
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