Live! cards vs Santacruz

[ThC 129 0]

I recently bought a Santa Cruz in place of my SB LIve! value and all i can say is that Turtlebeach has their act together. They are in their 3rd series of beta drivers which they say are far from done yet but their package is far better than Live!ware. Their cards have support for EAX 1.0, EAX 2.0 and A3d the same as live!Cards. Also unlike Live! cards they have WORKING AC-3 pass thoughand it doesnt have problems with SMP. OH OH OH and IT DOESNT CRACKLE and has working drivers.

[Yearout 0]

Hay ThC129

Last week I went out and bought the Cruz sound card just to check it out because my new Philips card was not work (now is) in whistler YES. I have to admit it worked great not one problem. Seams with each new build of whistler my sound card gets better.

You got a real got card.

[felix 0]

Right, you reckon the Santa Cruz card is good.

 

Cool, because my friggin Live!value died last friggin week and I am severely pi55ed.

 

Only 18 months old and it dies - what a croc of sh1t. I'm now using a 4yo SoundBlaster PNP ISA and it works!!!

 

Biatch.

 

PS does anyone know who sells the Santa Cruz or Philips card in Australia? I need a new soundcard - I hate only 2 speakers, must have atleast 4.

 

------------------

Written on Win2000 using:

PII 300

Aopen AX6B

288mb RAM

Diamond Viper 770 32mb

Matrox Millenium2 2mb

SBLive! Value

20gb Seagate

6gb WDCaviar

1.2gb Seagate

Pioneer 32x CD-R (Slot)

Realtek RTL8029AS 10mbit

MAG 15DLS 15"

Osborne MO117 17"

 

Using 100% Australian Made recyclable electrons

 

[This message has not been edited by felix (edited 35 January 3001).]

 

[This message has been edited by felix (edited 28 March 2001).]

[Vampyr 0]

Does the Santa Cruz support Wavepipe acceleration and does it have Soundfont support?

[ThC 129 0]

felix, i would check pricewatch.com or one of those sites to see what vendors will ship to you.

 

Vampyr, the Santa Cruz is everything the Live! isnt, so if the Live! has it then the SC probably has it too but better. Im pretty sure it can do both of those i know it has soundfonts too it. If you want to know more then go to VIAhardware.com and check their FAQ and/or msg boards.

[WGR 0]

Does anyone know if the Santa Cruz works solidly in EverQuest.. I know it's an old game, doesn't mean I don't want to play it.. I'm about 98% ready to dump Win2k altogether. The two issues that always held me back were graphics drivers and sound drivers...

 

Well, I've discovered that if you run the Radeon's latest drivers in NON-ACPI mode (ie. "Standard PC") it runs about on par with Win98 (maybe 5-10% behind). I'm not sure if hardware T&L is working, but with a 1.2ghz Athlon it really doesn't matter.

 

That leaves sound.. My SBLive has always been a pain in the butt in Win2k.. Switching from a P3 to an Athlon (and Via chipset) has made it slightly more so, but not as bad as one would think (it's main problem seems to be crackling while accessing storage (hd/cd) over it's normal IDE bus.. But I use Raid which uses it's own bus and pretty much stops the problem..

 

Almost every game I've installed in Win2k has been working great.. Here's the list:

 

Black and White - flawless

Tribes 2 - fine

Quake 3 - fine

UT - 3d sound distances seemed off, so went back to "No 3dsound" and works fine.

MDK2 - Fine AFAIK (even fixed a win98 graphics glitch with my Radeon).

Serious Sam - fine

Ultima 9 - fine

System Shock 2 - fine (except videos won't play in game.. Gotta work on that one)

 

That leaves EQ.. EQ runs.. But the sound has problems. 1) distances are off kilter (close sounds far & vice versa) 2) If you hold still sound has a tendency to cut out til you move again.

 

I would absolutely love to chuck my SBLive out the window (or into one of my other computers) and I'd even be willing to reinstall Win2k if I had to to get a clean driver install for the Santa Cruz.. The thing I have to know is.... WILL IT WORK BETTER THAN THE LIVE IN THESE GAMES????

 

Thanks in advance,

WGR

[Brian Frank 0]

I was terribly disappointed in the Radeon's performance--so when I tried it out I pretty much went with the GF2 MX card.

As for the sound card, Ive got a Guillemot Maxi Sound Fortissimo and it works great right off the bad with NO DRIVERS!!

All the complaints about SB Live! cards makes me really glad I didnt get one.

[OLEerror 0]

I'v been really happy with my Radeon 64meg. Especially with the latest beta drivers.

[ThC 129 0]

i have no problems with my SC in winXP. The only problem ive seen is that Tribes 2 won't enable 3d sound but i figure that is because Win XP is a beta OS.

[Beidomon 0]

For the life of me I cannot get my Santa Cruz to work with XP... the drivers install but there is no sound. I have heard of some issues some people have been having with XP and the SC but I don't know anything more in depth than that. Also, one of my friends tried getting his SC to work with XP to no avail, so it's not just me that's having this problem. Any ideas?

[ThC 129 0]

I dont know what you guys are doing but it has always worked fine for me on 2 different systems so i know its not a hardware problem. All i did was download the SC drivers from the website used the installer and everything went fine. Im able to use the Versajack as well as all the other ports in the card.

 

I used it on a

ASUS p2b with PIII450@504 and now on my T-bird 1.33 with Abit KT7a both installs were flawless and worked fine.

[Yearout 0]

I have to agree with ThC 129 when I tried the Cruz in 2465 it was buzzing with every sound. I just a screen saver with sound and after that it worked great. Yet I have to go back to my Philips Edge in the way it sounds. But if you can buy the Philips Edge just to hear it you can always return it.

 

 

 

"Keep the Faith"

[ThC 129 0]

ive heard from people the philips is good. The reason i bought the SC was because it has EAX 1,2 and A3d support. Does the philips card have these on it?? Though im not gonna get a new soundcard just yet but sound quality on my box means a lot to me.