Cheap Aureal Sound Cards

[splice]

Aureal Vortex SQ1500 4 Channel + Digital Out: $8.75

Aureal A3D Vortex Sound Card: $4.89

Drivers

Never used an Aureal card (no longer in business), but it seems like a good deal if you need cheap sound.

 

[J3anyus]

Aureal makes great cards if you don't need anything too elaborate. I'm planning on putting one of their cards in a LAN box I'm building, and I just may buy one from the links you posted. Thanks!

Edit: Is it just me or does the 'Aureal A3D Vortex Sound Card' look like it connects by some non-standard connection? PCI has 2 things of pins, a big one and then a little one. This card has a little one, then a big one, then a little one (or that's what the picture makes it look like). SVC lists it as PCI though. So...PCI or not?

 

[tigerbait]

This is a great retailer. Very fast shipping.

 

[ElectricLegs]

These are solid cards (get the $9 one) and sound great with a good set of speakers. Beats some ESS or off brand junk and almost all games support the A3D standard which CreativeLabs owns now so it'll be usable for a long time.

 

[badluck]

I have bought from this company and have no complaints.....

 

[littletemple]

But I don't think they have very good W2K drivers. The ones on the vortexofsound.com website are beta and are not that great. The sound fluctuates as it gets louder than softer and so on. Unless someone else has good drivers for these, let me KNOW!! If not, then these are good for win98 users IMO.

 

[Jugernot]

J3anyus, it uses a standard PCI slot... they just left out a couple of the pins that aren't needed. Many AGP card are like this, only some of the pins are used and an extra section of pins is split from the rest.

It will work in a standard PCI slot.

 

[CStrikeADDICT]

does anyone know if drivers for this card are bundled in the winxp cd?
and how does the better one compare to a 5.1 card? i've heard that a3d technology is better than eax technology...

edit
and aren't the better aureal cards the votex 2's??

 

[SlinkyDink]

you can change a register and fix nearly all of the win2k/xp problems with the aureal cards. wpcredit can do it, and I think that 'pci latency' patch has it included. I couldnt get my old aureal to work with xp and my kt133, so I just bought an audigy, its nice but not a huge ammount better than my aureal. I didnt even try the register patch, it would have fixed it. oh well.

pick them up, $9 is cheap.

 

[frogster220]

I have the sq1500. It doesn't work with win2k. wpcredit doesn't fix my win2k problem. but, it works well in 98.

 

[MisterE]

csADDICT, yes the Vortex2 chip is better. You can pick up an Aureal Vortex2 SuperQuad sQ2500 for $19 plus shipping here. 4-Channel output plus optical Digital out.

 

[Sanjoelo]

I'm running a Vortex 2-based card (Diamond MX300) in XP with the default drivers, and it detects and works flawlessly. I'm unsure of whether A3D works (A3D was Aureal's 3D sound standard), but otherwise the card works great. I wish Aureal were still around--they had some great stuff going.

-JB

 

[Roy2001]

Compgeeks has SQ2200, which is in fact Diamond MX300 + MX25 daughter card for only @14.

 

[renfield33]

i am also using the default drivers for my crappy a3d card in windows xp. the card works a lot better than the ac97 audio, but it really isn't that great. i want one of the philips acoustic edges or a real one, but i am not willing to spend 80-100 bucks on sound when i don't really use it that much.