Creative Labs Sound Blaster Live: A few hundred dollars, produces a crappy waveform on the oscilloscope (which means it's not nice clean and crisp sound), but with their speakers it doesn't really matter since htey're garbage too... And it hogs resources like you can't believe.
Turtle Beach/Santa Cruz Voyetra: Less than a hundred dollars, produces a cleaner waveform, expects you to buy someone elses nice and expensive set of speakers so you can hear the pretty wave form, doesn't want to consume every last resource known to your computer.
As for the 3dfx zealots, I have no idea what they're still fighting for. A 32MB SDRAM card (The Voodoo5 is a 32MB card, not a 64MB, dispite having 64MB onboard video memory. That memory is split between 2 processors, which makes it a 32MB card) doesn't compare to a 128MB DDRAM card, and even then the Voodoo chipsets graphics engine is simply outdated. It does minimal to no lighting effects, can't render 64bit texturing which is common now days...
Now, for it's time period, it was a great card. But better things have come out since. The card itself is still a wonderful piece of hardware, but it's become outdated and replaced by other cheaper and better cards.
Hm. Lessie, Voodoo5 requires you to plug a power cord directly into it to cool off it's two processors. GeForce4 MX cards with DDR memory have no cooling fan, and no external plug to power. Hrm. Which one is better performance and uses less electricity (therefore making it cheaper to run) and is cheaper to purchase? |
