Something for everyone
Written: Jul 02 '03
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Product Rating:
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Pros: great connections, sturdy, high quality, sounds good
Cons: broken hardware MP3 playback, poor 1/8" mic input
The Bottom Line: This is not a cheap card. That said, it's an easy sell for the person who needs the swiss army knife of sound cards. Recommended.
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| claymore_01's Full Review: Guillemot Maxi Sound Game Theater XP |
I have had this card since it first came out, for nearly two years now. When I bought it, I was tired of cheap PC components that break down shortly after you buy them or flake out after 6 months.
The Hercules Gametheatre XP reeks of quality as soon as you open the box. The cable that connects the card to the breakout box is massive, which means it is very heavily shielded. The box itself is sturdy and sleek, with more connections than you can shake a stick at. There is analog out for either 2 or 4 speakers via 1/8" plugs, or else Composite cables for 5.1 out with a separate plug for a subwoofer. There are digital optical and coax plugs for digital out, and input digital plugs as well. the box has a separate headphone jack, which is a high quality 1/4" plug. The breakout box also has two USB plugs and a standard midi/gamepad cable.
The card is either good or great depending what you want to use it for. As a component in a Home Theatre PC, you could hardly do any better than this unit. With the high quality cables and digital capabilities, this would be a fine connection point to an outside receiver or to an amp with the analog connections. The heavy shielding makes this a reliable component in terms of noise as well.
As a gamer, you could do far worse than this unit as well. The speaker connections allow for a very hefty system. I use it primarily with a 4.1 system, and the sound is clear and solid. The headphone jack makes it easy to switch over for night gaming as well. The unit has support for A3D and EAX2, although I find the EAX sound to be a little boomy at times.
In terms of music playback, the card sounds good. The hardware MP3 playback is still broken after many driver revisions, but since there are so many good software MP3 decoders that use hardly any CPU cycles, I really don't think it matters. The Midi support is not great, but I don't think this is the card a high end midi composer would choose. If it was not for a low quality microphone input, the unit would also be an easy sell for people who wanted to do some basic recording. That said, I have not tried it with an 1/4" mic, which may work better. There are stereo composite line ins, as well, so it would be a good unit for some basic toying with the world of recording.
After 2 years, I have had no trouble at all with this card. The drivers at first for Windows 2000/XP were awful, but Hercules has really delivered in recent revisions, and drivers are now as stable as the hardware.
The card came with a lot of program demos and not many full products, but it did come with some useful speaker setup programs, as well as PowerDVD, which is great.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 180
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Epinions.com ID:
claymore_01
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Location: Waterloo, Ontario, Canada
Reviews written: 4
Trusted by: 2 members
About Me:
I am a movie loving English Literature student currently getting my master's degree.
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