Granto's Full Review: Rio Diamond Monster Sound MX300
I bought this card quite a while after it came out. I previously had an Ensoniq AudioPCI card, which was one of the first PCI soundcards. It worked fine for me, but I wanted to upgrade to the MX300 to play games with 3d sound.
Hearing the 3d sound effects in the game Unreal was awesome. You could hear echos and muffled things around corners.
But quite often, the sounds would start repeating endlessly, like a broken record, until you quit a game, or rebooted. Disabling the cool 3d sound usually fixed that.
Then Aureal went out of business. I didn't care much, I had working drivers for windows 98.
Then I upgraded to Windows2000. Which came with working drivers, made by Microsoft. But no A3D effects in the builtin driver. So I functionally had the same thing as a generic $10 soundcard. Okay, no big deal. 3D sounds are cool, but I didn't have much time for gaming anymore.
Pretty much any soundcard can play mp3s, games, streaming media, etc, with quality good enough that 99%+ of people can't tell the difference between a low end and a high end card. Any soundcard claiming to be "MP3 ready" is just marketing garbage. You can play MP3's on the original SoundBlaster16 from 1992 just fine. The only difference between a SB Live! MP3 and the other versions is the software they come with. Other than that, you just need some CPU power to decode the MP3.
Then I got a couple new computers. Now, there is no compatibility issue with AMD processors themselves. But it just so happens that AMD based computers use motherboard chipsets, mostly from VIA, that often have problems with Aureal sound chipsets.
So I had to do elaborate driver shuffling tricks to get it to work. And it still would not work sometimes. And with no 3d sound.
So I recently got a SB Live! It works well. With 3D. Some people do have compatibility issues with VIA chipsets, but at least the companies are still around, working to resolve the problems.
I would not buy this card today, because it is outdated, and has no real benefits over anything else. Support is lacking, as the chipset maker is defunct.
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