Diamond Monster Sound MX400 Manufacturer : Diamond Multimedia Pricing: $99 Availability: Out Now Reviewed by: Date : April 20th 2000

Testing

Ok…. so now that we know what the MX400 is capable of we put it through our testing process …. The MX400 was put against Aureal's SQ2500 and Creative Labs' Sound Blaster Live! through Audio Winbench '99 testing. Surprisingly the MX400`s almost 6% CPU utilization was quite high compared to the other 3D sound cards. But then in a real world scenario the difference between one sound card having 2% CPU utilization and another having 6% utilization is a negligibly small amount. And this difference does not incline that the latter card is thrice as slow as the first.

As a real-world performance indicator we ran DESCENT 3. We found the MX400 to be lagging behind the rest of the field in software and DirectSound testing. But a definite thumbs up for the MX400 in DirectSound3D and EAX benchmarking. With DirectSound3D and EAX API the MX400 was about 7-9 frames per second faster than the two competitors.

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