Hercules soundcards ?

[Dogbert]

What do you think of 'em as an alternative to the nvidia of sound - Creative ?

[Dr Mordrid]

Both the Hercules Game Theater XP and the Turtle Beach Santa Cruz are EXCELLENT alternatives to the Creative cards.

I have several Santa Cruz's (Videologic Sonic Fury outside North America) and they are just great. They sound fantastic and use VERY little in the way of PCI bandwidth when using DirectSound. Excellent for editing systems.

The Game Theater XP is based on the same chipset and from everything I've heard it shares the Santa Cruz's low bandwidth and great sound while adding some other features like a BOB.

Either way you win.

Dr. Mordrid

[dave m]

Our home cinema is based around a Hercules Game Theater XP, all feeding into a Yamaha AV amp. It's piped though the SPDIF output for Dolby Digital/DTS, stereo inputs for Dolby Prologic TV via a Hauppuage TV card and six channel input from the analogue outputs on the BOB for clever stuff in gaming, it sounds great.

Dave

[Gurm]

Note the following:

The CURRENT Hercules drivers are just fine. If, however, a new sound standard is introduced, the average time for Hercules to create new drivers for any given OS/API is about 2 years after release.

The Santa Cruz is a WONDERFUL card. However, if you like games by Bioware - Baldur's Gate, Planescape, Bladur's Gate 2, Icewind Dale, Neverwinter Nights, Icewind Dale 2... they will sound garbled and messed up on ALL Crystal-based cards. Your only option if you intend to play these games is Creative or Philips.

- Gurm

[az]

Or terratec.

BTW, Gurm, I have the same problem with my el cheapo soundcard in some games and the new winamp crossfading directsound plugin, turning down hardware acceleration cures it.

AZ

[Gurm]

Great. Turning down hardware acceleration, thereby turning off 3D sound and slowing down your machine. Not an acceptable solution. Crystal/Hercules/Turtle Beach REFUSE to fix this problem. I'm betting your cheapo card has a crystal chip as well.

- Gurm

[Claymonkey]

Built a box for a friend a couple months back with the Hercules Fortissimo II. Was VERY tempted to switch my SB Live for it. Sounded A LOT better. My friend isn't into Bioware games (though I am), so I didn't test those. But the 30+ games I did test worked great. On that note, I built his computer with a SiS chipset board and that was the most stable computing experience I have ever had.

[Dr Mordrid]

OT a bit....

... I built his computer with a SiS chipset board and that was the most stable computing experience I have ever had.

Know how you feel. Who would have ever thought we would saying that about SiS chipsets? I tried the SiS 735 chipped K7S5A out of desparate frustration with VIA. Now I have several K7S6A (SiS745) boards running here in addition to it.

What a shift in my opinion of SiS that cheap little board caused....

So now VIA dupes SiS's 533 mb/s north/south bridge bus just in time for SiS to up it to 1066 mb/s when their next southbridge comes out

Dr. Mordrid

[Reverend Maynard]

I have the Game Theater XP. I like it overall, but there are minor glitches in the drivers that kind of irk me. I bought the GTXP because of the connections the breakout box has, makes connection to my stereo nice and easy.

[Dr Mordrid]

Is there a card that doesn't have glitches? I don't know of one.

With some it's not playing a certain game while with others (someone say CREATIVE?) it's screwing the whole system with *really bad* drivers that won't uninstall properly and hogging the bus

Dr. Mordrid

[The PIT]

Originally posted by Dr Mordrid
With some it's not playing a certain game while with others (someone say CREATIVE?) it's screwing the whole system with *really bad* drivers that won't uninstall properly and hogging the bus

Dr. Mordrid

Yup I had great fun uninstalling sblive drivers. Always use Ghost before uninstalling sblive drivers otherwise spend hours trying find out why windoze suddenly bluescreens.