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Originally published at Internet.com The days of ISA sound cards are dead as manufacturers have made their final move to the PCI bus for greater bandwidth and performance. With the availability and price of the PCI sound cards and modems in the same price range as their ISA counterparts, we will start to see more motherboard manufacturers offering board configurations with no ISA slots. General Specs * Windows 95/98/NT 4.0 and real-mode DOS (95/98 Plug & Play) * Accelerates A3D, DirectSound, and Directsound3D * General MIDI compatible for playback of standard MIDI files Digital Audio * 64 - Voice wavetable synthesizer * 48 - DirectSound streams * 8 - 3D Audio streams * 16 - Bit full-duplex stereo allowing simultaneous playback and recording * 5 kHz to 48 kHz sample rate, stereo and full-duplex
Summary
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Price Street $25 MSRP $49
+ Positional 3D Audio support Real-mode DOS support Great software bundle
- High CPU Load A3D is choppy with a slow CPU
Overall If you want to get rid of an old ISA sound card and are looking for an affordable upgrade to PCI, this is the card to buy. At a street price of $25, its hard to beat. ---------------------------------------------------------------------
Setup as tested:
AMD K6-233 Matsonic 6210 Diamond Monster3D II 64MB PC66 SDRAM
So what came with it?
The retail version of the Diamond Sonic Impact S90 came with a small pamphlet type manual, a CD with the drivers and software bundle, a 3 level demo of Jedi Knight - Dark Forces II, and a product registration card. The installation manual was short, sweet, and to the point. It is basically a guide for a novice to follow for installing a device under Windows 95/98 for the first time.
It doesn't get any easier to install a new PnP device under Windows 98. After inserting the sound card into a PCI slot, I booted up the computer and the OS immediately found it and prompted me to insert the driver CD. I rebooted the computer and it finished installing the software applications (Midisoft MediaWorks 98, Internet Soundbar 2.0, Studio Recording Session, and Jukebox MP3 Utilities) that came with it. The utilities that came with the CD are great. If you don't already have a MP3 player, there is one in the bundle and the media player searches your hard drive to finnd all the compatible audio files rather than you having to manually search for them.
Note: I downloaded the 12/29/98 driver release for the Diamond Sonic Impact S90 from Diamond's Web site and had serious problems with them (Blue Screen of Death). I went back to the old retail release of the drivers until new drivers were released on 1/5/99. I did not experience any problems with these.
Sound Quality/Performance
I found the Diamond Sonic Impact to have sharper and crisper sound as compared to the Ensoniq AudioPCI and Yamaha OP3L-SAx sound cards that I tested. The A3D makes a huge difference when playing such games as Unreal or Jedi Knight - Dark Forces II that utilize its technology. 3D gaming is a whole new experience with the positional 3D audio that drags you into the surrealism of the game.
One problem that I incurred while testing the card is how much raw CPU power the A3D needed while playing Unreal. The K6-233 didn't have enough horsepower to maintain both the video and sound which made the sound quite choppy. When I put the card into a Celeron 450A system, everything was smooth and much more playable.
I ran some tests comparing the Diamond Sonic Impact S90 to the Yamaha OPL3-SAx on the K6-233 system and found some interesting results: Quake II Demo1 800x600 Diamond Sonic Impact S90 25.6 fps - Tone Control Disabled 27.1 fps Yamaha OPL3-SAx 28.7 fps No Sound 31.4 fps The timedemo was run a total of 3 times for each and the figures shown are the average of the 3.
The Sonic Impact roughly used 18.5% of the CPU's time while the Yamaha only used 8.6%. If your running a low end system and like to do a bit of 3D gaming, the sound card will cut into your FPS performance of your system severely.
I received an e-mail regarding the CPU usage of the Sonic Impact and was told that by disabling the tone control option (It can be found by double-clicking the volume control icon in the system tray and entering the advanced options.) the speed should improve. I ran the tests again with this option disabled and observed a 5.8% increase in speed bringing the CPU utilization of this sound card down to 12.7% on this particular system. However, I did notice some degradation in the sound quality by disabling the tone control option.
Good Stuff
The Sonic Impact is in a price range that would make it an attractive buy for the average user that likes to do some 3D gaming and wants the added realism of 3D positional sound that it takes advantage of. The OEM version of the card can be found as cheap as $25 on the web, but if you opt to have the extra utilities that come in the retail version, it can be found for a few dollars extra.
Bad Stuff
The major downfall of this sound card is the fact that it utilizes too much of the CPU's time. The 10% performance hit as compared to a standard 16-bit sound card is considerable, but if you have a mid to high end system there is no need to worry.
Conclusion
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Author: Scott Mahaney
Read article at Internet.com site