Review: Hercules Game Theater XP (Page 5/8)

Posted: March 12, 2001
Written by: Tuan "Solace" Nguyen

Hardware Setup and Drivers

Setting up the GTXP went without a hitch. While physically setting up everything takes a bit longer than your average sound card, it’s probably going to be a good experience if you end up purchasing the card. After everything was installed, driver installation proceeded in Windows 2000 Professional. The eventual path of the driver industry for the PC will be based upon Windows 2000’s driver model so testing within the Windows 2000 environment should give us an idea of what to expect now and down the road.

Windows 2000 Professional Issues

Initially, testing in Windows 2000 went very well. However, I soon began experiencing random crashes relating to ntoskrnl.exe that didn’t ever stop. Our system could never last for more than 45 minutes. I was actually afraid to do anything productive. I’m one of those people who forget to save often, and having the computer crash randomly all the time is not a pretty issue and can lead to more serious consequences than just a document loss.

Talking to Alan (FiringSquad), also revealed issues with Windows 2000 and DirectX 8. For him, running with DX7 proved to be rock solid. However, we were also testing with DX7 ourselves! Our system configurations were similar so it could be that the root of the problem is deeper than DX issues.

Testing in Windows 98 SE went well as we didn’t encounter any of the problems Windows 2000 gave us. Hercules does not have certified Windows 2000 drivers available online as of this writing but will be available within a week or two so keep an eye out for those. Hercules also assured us that Windows 2000 and DX8 problems will be addressed in the coming driver release.

Update!!!

Navin Sekhon, Product Manager at Guillemot just sent me beta drivers that are nearing complete for me to test out the GTXP. Please note that the following drivers are BETA and are not to be used to fully judge what the final drivers will be like. Although these drivers are very close to being finished, there are still some things that need to be ironed out. I will talk about them in the next section as the drivers on the retail CD have the same problem.

Drivers

Let’s take a look at what Hercules has done in terms of driver work.

Main Volume Control
Within the Main window, adjustments can be made to volume control for specific functions and controls. Individual volume for each speaker can be controlled independently. Different modes of speaker setup are available from simple headphones to a full 5.1 setup.

Take your pick!
Hercules has put a lot of work into these drivers and it shows. You can literally hear the difference. If you use the Windows 2000 default drivers for the GTXP, you’ll get audio that has the quality of a non digital voice recorder -- the phone even sounds better.

There are lots of features built into the GTXP that can only be harnessed if you use the Hercules drivers. These drivers are far from reference and definitely show that a lot of thought went into R&D.

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