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Most commonly associated with the PowerVR line of video graphics chips, VideoLogic is actually a multi-faceted company. Described as two companies under the same name, VideoLogic Systems is considered a separate entity from the company that designs chips. VideoLogic Systems is an integrator and is actually one of VideoLogic's chip customers. Video cards, however, are not their only business. With a strong emphasis on the convergence of home cinema with home computing, VideoLogic also has a strong PC audio presence.

Breaking away from their ESS based sound cards, VideoLogic decided to go with Aureal's latest - the Vortex2. With the same performance and specs as the popular Diamond MX300, VideoLogic delivers some of the latest and greatest in video gaming quality sound at a very affordable price.

Following almost strictly the reference design, the SonicVortex2 delivers everything we have come to expect from the Vortex2 chipset, but is seriously lacking in the value-added department. In fact the only thing of note, that you may not find on other Vortex2 based cards is an Optical output without the need of an additional daughterboard. Take a look at what you get:

Audio Processor Aureal Vortex2 AU8830 PCI 92 Stream DirectSound Acceleration A3D 2.0 with 76 channels 320 Voice Wavetable DLS and DirectMusic support AC97 compliant CODEC

Signal to Noise Ratio: Better than -100dB A-weighted (-94dB unweighted) Sample Rates: Up to 48kHz playback/record. S/P-DIF output sample rates: 32kHz, 44.1 kHz, and 48kHz