System Setup

Test System Setup

AMD Duron 600 Processor
Abit KT7-RAID

Mushkin High Performance PC133 CAS2 SDRAM - 1x128MB
Western Digital Caviar 7200rpm 18gb EIDE HD

NVIDIA Reference GeForce2 GTS 32MB (Driver Version 6.31)
Turtle Beach Santa Cruz
Creative Labs Sound Blaster Live! X-Gamer
Phillip's Acoustic Edge

Windows 98SE

Benchmarks

ZDBop's Audio Winbench '99

Unreal Tournament 640x480x16 (fs.dem benchmark)

Quake III Arena - 640x480 Fastest

Installation Notes

The Acoustic Edge's drivers are well designed and offer easy access to all necessary configuration options. Furthermore, Philips has streamlined the installation process so that the software installation prompts come up automatically, making for a simple install.

In order to fit all of the I/O ports on the sound card, Philips designed two cables that connect via a PS/2-like connector and offer three I/O ports each. Unfortunately, these cables have a bad habit of falling out of sound card when lightly bumped or kicked.

Compatibility

Although most sound cards proudly support all 3D sound APIs, this isn't always a guarantee of error-free 3D sound. In compatibility testing with over ten different game titles, the Acoustic Edge fared very well, although it did falter in a few situations with its EAX support.

Both in Motocross Madness 2 and Soldier of Fortune, the Acoustic Edge offered unbalanced if not buggy EAX sound. Nonetheless, this compatibility issue doesn't severely limit gameplay, and can be avoided by switching to DirectSound3D output.