What would a review be without a set of benchmarks? We ran the MX400 against Aureal's SQ2500 and Creative Labs' Sound Blaster Live! Value in a battle for the lowest CPU utililization. To better understand the impact of an API on game performance, Quake3 was run with A3D both enabled and disabled on the SQ2500.
- Processor: Intel Pentium III 733MHz
- Video: ASUS V6600 GeForce 256 Deluxe
- Memory: 128MB RDRAM
- Motherboard: ASUS P3C-E
- Hard Drive: Western Digital 5GB
- OS: Windows 98 SE with DirectX 7
Sound Cards:
- Diamond Monster Sound MX400 / 4.07.00.2004
- Creative Labs Sound Blaster Live! Value / 4.06.711 + LiveWare 3
- Aureal SQ2500 / 2048
For testing CPU utilization we used ZDNet's Audio WinBench 99, which runs through a series of .wavs in DirectSound and DirectSound 3D. Aureal's SQ2500 came up with the overall lowest CPU usage (a tribute to the driver team at Aureal bringing utilization down drastically). Unfortunately the MX400 brought up the rear, with results that have also been highly polished since the Canyon3D's introduction.
Quake III: Arena was run as an indication of real-world performance. The three cards all score relatively close to each other with the sore thumb being Aureal's solution running A3D. For these tests, visual quality was set to Normal and audio quality was set to High.