Bundle: - MX300 (Half-Life: Day One, Recoil, MusicMatch MP3 Jukebox utility, Midisoft MediaWorks98, Zoran SoftDVD player) - SBLive! Value (Unreal EAX Special Edition, Creative Playcenter, Creative AudioHQ, TextAssist, VoiceAssist) Price: MX300 ($99) - SBLive! Value ($99)

Both the Creative Sound Blaster Live! and the Diamond MX300 have had their fair share of online accolades and positive reviews thrown at them over the past month. With the retail release of the MX300 finally occurring this week, Sharky Extreme felt that a head to head shootout between the two cards was justified.

In the following article we're going to evaluate the general abilities of both cards towards determining which product best offers an immersive 3D gaming atmosphere.

The various features of both cards will be compared, as will their nuances. 3D audio positioning via MS DirectSound3D, MS DirectSound3D EAX, and Aureal's A3D 2.0 will be the most important factor we evaluate towards determining a winner.

Audio cards have come a long way since their initial beginnings in the early 80s. From the "Adlib" cards to the MX300 and SBLive!, the standards and features that consumers expect from their audio solutions have risen to the point where the cards require DSPs capable of more than 500 million instructions per second.

The evolution of sound in the gaming environment has also proceeded along a strong technology path of progress, with several breakthroughs occurring only recently with true 3D positional audio support.

The ability to throw a sound into space from either two or four speakers and have it seem to the player as if it's coming from the left, right, or even behind them is nothing short of amazing.