First Impressions and Installation

Egad! Not the pastels!

The Aureal SQ2500

The Back

When you first look at the card you immediately notice the pastel colored PC99 compliant connectors that Intel and Microsoft are forcing on the industry. (Well, you know how them boys over in Redmond and Santa Clara love their pastels.) The card itself uses a blue-green PCB, a step away from the shiny black-brown PCBs we've been seeing from recent sound cards.

The AU8830 Chip

The Aureal Vortex2 chip is the usual AU8830 chip we've seen on other SuperQuad cards, with a slight difference -our SuperQuad reference card has an "AU8830AU" label. In any case, the we already know that the SQ2500 uses an optimized Vortex2 chip. The design of the SQ2500 board is very similar to the SuperQuad, but there is an extra "JP3" header on the card.

Installation and Setup

Installation was a breeze. The card came with a driver CD, but we found newer drivers on the Aureal website. After physically installing the card into our test bed, we turned on the system, and Windows properly detected the new hardware. We installed the new drivers, rebooted and everything worked perfectly.

Test System

Intel Celeron 400 processor
Abit BE6 motherboard
Corsair PC-100 3.3v SDRAM - 1x128MB
Diamond TNT2 Ultra (150/183)
Driver version 2.08 (Detonator)
Western Digital 102AA 10.2GB 5400RPM ATA-66 HD

Aureal SQ2500 Quad PCI sound card
Driver version 4.06.2040
Aureal SuperQuad reference sound card
Driver version 4.06.2040
Sound Blaster Live! value
Live!Ware 2.1
Terratec DMX(Canyon3D)
Driver version 4.05.00.0800