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In the Forums... |
Posted: July 29, 2000 Written by: Tuan "Solace" Nguyen The DVD Decoder [ Sigma Designs REALMagic Hollywood+ $ 42.00 ]  With a system this powerful, why bother with a dedicated decoder card at all? Well, the fact is, decoding the MPEG2 format in software is extremely taxing on the processor. You’ll want to be able to watch a movie while downloading and burning a few discs at 12X without a hitch. And a dedicated decoder can relieve the decoding tasks off of the processor. There is no better decoder out there than the Sigma Designs REALMagic Hollywood+. This card produces the best images we have ever seen and even lets a Pentium 90 play back silky smooth DVD. You haven’t seen DVD until you’ve seen it on a REALMagic piped into the Sony W900. You’ll never leave your seat. The card can also decode MPEG1 format as well. A good thing is that this card has outputs to an external display. You can pipe the signals into your large projection TV or into a projector for insane DVD experiences. Also a plus is an S/PDIF output so you can pipe the audio signal in its true digital form to a Dolby Digital receiver and you’ll be enjoying 6 channels of discrete audio fidelity. I can’t really ask for more from this card. Image quality is slightly reduced do to the pass through cable that you have to use. Now that we can play games at insane resolutions and watch DVD on our 24 inch wide screen, we’re left without sound. That’s just not acceptable for the ultimate PC. The Sound Card [ Creative Labs Sound Blaster Live! Platinum w/ Live Drive II: $ 155.00 ]  It was a touch choice, but it came down to the Live! Platinum. This card has ample processing power and supports all major 3D sound API’s including Aureal’s A3D 1.0. It has great capabilities along with great software support as well. A host of games support Creative Labs’ EAX API, which isn’t really a 3D sound API but rather reverberation effects. You may want to check out my guide on How 3D Audio Works to get an idea as to what I’m talking about. Also, the Platinum also has the Live! Drive which gives you a host of functions and connections on a standard 5.25” drive bay panel. The Live! Drive II is more impressive and contains more controls and connectors for the really insane audiophile. We’ll take one of those. Let’s get on to some serious specs for this card. Wave-Table Synthesis - E-mu Systems EMU10K1 music synthesis engine - 64-voice polyphony with E-mu's patented 8-point interpolation technology - Uses SoundFont® technology for user-definable wave-table sample sets; includes 2MB, 4MB and 8MB sets - Load up to 32MB of samples into host memory for professional music reproduction - Scalable PCI wave-table synthesis architecture - Up to 1024-voice polyphony with multi-timbre capability - 48 MIDI channels with 128 GM & GS-compatible instruments and 10 drum kits |
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