Sound, Lights, Power

By Jerry Pournelle

April 28, 2003

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Column 273 (Continued from the Previous Week)

A Graphics Sweet Spot

One thing I learned from building Anastasia is that the ATI powered XTASY 9100 with 128 MB of on-board memory is one sweet video card. It puts up great text. Games, including online games like EverQuest and Dark Age of Camelot, are beautiful and run without glitches or jerkiness. I am presuming there are games I can throw at this board that will cause it to do something I don't like, but frankly I haven't found them yet.

Installation was simple. The drivers that came with the board got it started, then a quick trip to the ATI web site brought better. There are lots of adjustments and tweaks you can do if you like that sort of thing.

DVD movies play just fine on this system.

If you're looking for a video board for anything short of the very latest extreme games, look into the ATI RADEON 9000 Pro systems (of which the XTASY 9100 is one example). It's plenty good enough until you need DirectX 9.

Turtle Beach Santa Cruz

I can understand why Bob Thompson recommends the Turtle Beach Santa Cruz sound board. It sounds great, and there are a lot of features you can read about on the CD-ROM that comes with it; the documentation is pretty thin, and there's more information on the box about the capabilities of the board than there are in any documents inside the box, but it's all there on the CD-ROM.

There are two sound channels, and surround sound capability if you want to install 4 or 6 speakers. It works very well, so well it's a bit spooky to play EverQuest or Dark Age of Camelot and hear things coming up behind you. All the music and sounds from those games is very clear, more clear than I was getting from the Intel on-board sound cards, but of course part of that is due to using 4 speakers. The board actually will support 6 speakers in various combinations to give even more "Surround Sound" effect.

The Santa Cruz comes with quite a lot of software, including a demo of a program called Sound Surgeon that appears to be their version of Sound Forge.

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