MX400 Features

MX400 Features

What's this sound card going to feature? Diamond knows that he MX400 will have to deliver if it's going to be a worthy successor to the Monster Sound MX300. Here's what you can expect to find on the box.

• PCI 2.0 Compliant
• 32 Hardware Accelerated DirectSound Streams
• 32 Hardware Accelerated DirectSound3D Streams
• 1 Mic In
• 1 Stereo Line In
• Front Stereo Speaker Out
• Rear Stereo Speaker Out
• 1 Coax S/PDIF Out
• CD-Audio In
• TAD In
• AUX In
• I3D2 hardware and driver compatibility
• A3D 1.0 compatibility
• EAX 1.0 and EAX 2.0 compatibility
• Sensaura Environment Effects
• Rio Upgrade connector for Daughterboard
• Digital Audio software
• Slave Zero, Net-active version
• Test Drive 2: Off Road, Net-active version

Diamond MX400 Slide

Questions about Canyon3D

Having experience with several Canyon3D products, we had a few questions and concerns that Diamond was more than eager to answer. The first was about mixing and simultaneous independent streams. Older generation sound cards only allowed for one program to access the audio device simultaneously. Additionally, sounds recorded at different bit rates and frequencies could not be re-mixed and rendered simultaneously. This meant that you could only hear one wav at a time, whether that was an MP3, system alert, or game effect.

The first mainstream PCI product, Diamond's own original Monster Sound, finally allowed the PC to support that crucially missing feature. Since then, every sound card has supported multiple sound streams in Windows. Unfortunately, at the time of review, none of the Canyon3D products did. We spoke to ESS about this, and they assured us that it was simply a problem with driver immaturity, and updates would solve the problem. We brought this point up with Diamond, who mentioned that this was their first priority when signing up with ESS. After all, with e-mail notification, ICQ, MP3, and games, this little feature has become one of the little niceties that we just can't live without.

Driver Issues

Another Canyon3D issue was CPU utilization. The Sound Blaster Live! makes use of a powerful DSP, the Emu10K1 (a Creative-designed processor) that has earned the product acclaim as the lowest CPU-sapping sound card on the market. Aureal's foremost task with the Vortex2 has been to match or surpass this, and with driver revisions (and a new run of 8830 silicon for the SQ2500), they're also in the sub 1% CPU usage mark for most audio functions. The current drivers for the Canyon3D however, supported no accelerated 3D sound streams, making the host processor draw anywhere from 5 to 30% peak usage to render sounds in 3 dimensions.