Aureal is no stranger in PC audio market. In the past few years, they've rocketed themselves from being unknown to rivaling the popularity of Creative Labs line of sound cards. Before Aureal came around, Creative Labs was the only viable solution for decent performing cards that had the best compatibility around. I would venture to say that the biggest boost that Aureal got was from Diamond's MX200 (Vortex) and MX300 (Vortex2) excellent cards. These cards had the best mix of features, performance and price which made them very popular (especially amongst gamers) and brought Aureal into the limelight. In the last year, Aureal decided to go solo (like 3dfx) and manufacturer their own products based on their own chips.

In this review we'll be taking a look at Aureal current top-of-the line card, the Vortex2 SQ2500 Quad PCI sound card. It's packed full of features, has a great software bundle and has the best 3D sound implementation available. So it should be no surprise to you (especially if you've seen other reviews), that we loved this card. In this review we'll be taking a look at this card using the new 2048 drivers with EAX support and the newest A3D drivers (currently 3.12). Lets start off by taking a look at it's feature set:

The specs are pretty decent, most of the features are pretty much standard other than the Dolby Digital 5.1 support. This is perhaps the most intriguing feature of this board and

The Vortex2 chip has been used on many other cards in the past, so we all know that it provides great sound quality and some of the best 3D audio. Unfortunately, using 3D sound inflicts quite a hit on the performance of your system because it requires more processing from the Vortex2 and your system's CPU. The SQ2500 is the first card to uses Aureal new revision of the Vortex2 which is supposed to reduce CPU usage when 3D sound is in use. The new chips are labeled with a 'B0' instead of the old 'A2' you may have seen. We'll be comparing the CPU usage against a Diamond MX300 to see how much performance difference there actually is. This new revision also has a slight better signal-to-noise ration of 98dB as opposed to 96dB with the old chip.

Besides the new revision of the chip, the card also has a Coaxial S/PDIF digital out port which is great for musicians who want to digitally output their music or if you want to output the audio signal from your DVD-ROM drive to your home theatre receiver. That way you eliminate line noise and are still able to send over Dolby Digital encoded material to be processed by your Receiver (if it has an S/PDIF in and a Dolby Digital decoder). If you require an optical S/PDIF out, you could buy a converter, but those usually cost quite a bit of money.

Other than that, all of the other features are pretty much standard with all other Vortex2 cards, but still exceptionally higher than most generic PCI sound cards. For example, other than the Sound Blaster Live! (which even falls short in some cases), there aren't many cards out there that can boast a 576-voice wavetable synthesizer or 76 streams of DirectSound3D acceleration. Beyond that, Aureal's Vortex2 is the only card that is able accelerate A3D 2.0 in hardware. From what I've seen, no other card has A3D 2.0 support.

Next Page:What's In The Box/Installation/Software Bundle

Aureal is no stranger in PC audio market. In the past few years, they've rocketed themselves from being unknown to rivaling the popularity of Creative Labs line of sound cards. Before Aureal came around, Creative Labs was the only viable solution for decent performing cards that had the best compatibility around. I would venture to say that the biggest boost that Aureal got was from Diamond's MX200 (Vortex) and MX300 (Vortex2) excellent cards. These cards had the best mix of features, performance and price which made them very popular (especially amongst gamers) and brought Aureal into the limelight. In the last year, Aureal decided to go solo (like 3dfx) and manufacturer their own products based on their own chips.

In this review we'll be taking a look at Aureal current top-of-the line card, the Vortex2 SQ2500 Quad PCI sound card. It's packed full of features, has a great software bundle and has the best 3D sound implementation available. So it should be no surprise to you (especially if you've seen other reviews), that we loved this card. In this review we'll be taking a look at this card using the new 2048 drivers with EAX support and the newest A3D drivers (currently 3.12). Lets start off by taking a look at it's feature set:

The specs are pretty decent, most of the features are pretty much standard other than the Dolby Digital 5.1 support. This is perhaps the most intriguing feature of this board and

The Vortex2 chip has been used on many other cards in the past, so we all know that it provides great sound quality and some of the best 3D audio. Unfortunately, using 3D sound inflicts quite a hit on the performance of your system because it requires more processing from the Vortex2 and your system's CPU. The SQ2500 is the first card to uses Aureal new revision of the Vortex2 which is supposed to reduce CPU usage when 3D sound is in use. The new chips are labeled with a 'B0' instead of the old 'A2' you may have seen. We'll be comparing the CPU usage against a Diamond MX300 to see how much performance difference there actually is. This new revision also has a slight better signal-to-noise ration of 98dB as opposed to 96dB with the old chip.

Besides the new revision of the chip, the card also has a Coaxial S/PDIF digital out port which is great for musicians who want to digitally output their music or if you want to output the audio signal from your DVD-ROM drive to your home theatre receiver. That way you eliminate line noise and are still able to send over Dolby Digital encoded material to be processed by your Receiver (if it has an S/PDIF in and a Dolby Digital decoder). If you require an optical S/PDIF out, you could buy a converter, but those usually cost quite a bit of money.

Other than that, all of the other features are pretty much standard with all other Vortex2 cards, but still exceptionally higher than most generic PCI sound cards. For example, other than the Sound Blaster Live! (which even falls short in some cases), there aren't many cards out there that can boast a 576-voice wavetable synthesizer or 76 streams of DirectSound3D acceleration. Beyond that, Aureal's Vortex2 is the only card that is able accelerate A3D 2.0 in hardware. From what I've seen, no other card has A3D 2.0 support.

Next Page:What's In The Box/Installation/Software Bundle