Installation

Installing the MX300 was an absolute breeze. After installing the card in my PC and rebooting, I pointed the Plug and Play detection routine to the latest Aureal Vortex 2 reference drivers. They installed without a hitch.

One advantage of the current MX300 design is that, instead of the custom Digital Signal Processor that was used with the previous Monster Sound cards, an Aureal Vortex 2 chip is used. The great thing about this is that we can use the Aureal reference drivers for the card, instead of relying on Diamond's spotty custom drivers and their peculiar implementation quirks. The first owners of the original Monster Sound will know exactly what I am talking about here.

A word on compatibility -- I should point out here that unlike previous Monster Sound cards, there are no DOS support or gameport support issues with the MX300. Aureal's older Vortex 1 design never suffered from these problems, which were specific to Diamond's DSP implementation, and neither does the new Vortex 2. I tested real-mode DOS gaming with Duke Nukem 3D, and it worked flawlessly as an emulated Sound Blaster Pro. Similarly, I was able to plug my Microsoft Sidewinder Force Feedback steering wheel into the gameport and had no problems.