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

Setting up:

Installing the MX400 is no harder than setting up any other PCI sound card. Fix it into a free PCI slot and just install the Windows drivers from it's drivers CD. If you are not running on Windows 95 or 98 then get ready to hit the ceiling. The Windows NT drivers do not support positional audio, and the same goes with Linux. It gets better. The Windows 2000 drivers are not complete yet and all you other OS users….hmmm…better luck next time folks!!! The MX400 control panel is simple and (too) straightforward. The control panel only features options to select MIDI RAM size (2 or 4mb), to toggle SP/DIF output, to change the speaker configuration and test the speakers. There's no fader to adjust speaker balance from front to rear, there's no information on EAX and no options for reverb levels. Also, to enable the headphone output the driver settings had to be accessed through system properties. (Proved to be an added hassle!!)…I'd say the controls could have been made more user-friendly.

Performance:

I've been using and evaluating many sound cards for quite a while now. Up to now I considered the Live! Series to be the best 3D sound card available. But if 3D sound is what you want this is the best card ever. It was a sure winner in Benchmarking with faster frame rates in DS3D and EAX than the sound blaster live!. Sound quality from the MX400 was noticeably bright, thanks to the Canyon3D processor.

Value:

The cards listed retail price is set at $99, so you should be able to find it somewhere between $60 and $85. It comes with more than your typical sound card package; diamonds 'monster bundle' is complete with demos, Zoran's SoftDVD Player, several audio entertainment titles and Yamaha's Soft Synthesizer S-YXG50. The fact that the MX400 offers the most advanced top-of-the-range 3D sound, anything less than $70 is an absolute bargain.

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