Question about Turtle Beach Santa Cruz

[Modge]

Does the Santa Cruz card have any compatible 5.25" component similar to Creative's Live! Drive? I was looking at this picture and saw the upgrade header and thought that there might be a component like the Live Drive but can't seem to find anything else about it. I'm upgrading to a new PC slowly, piece by piece, and I want to get away from the Creative line but don't want to get rid of my live drive, so if I can find a "Live Drive" for the Santa Cruz I'm sold.

 

[paralazarguer]

YOu can't unfortunately, however santa cruz has its problems. See the quote from a review at the bottom. Also, click here to see a breakdown that I wrote of how the audigy outperforms the live.

"Other reviewers and users have found the driver stability to be the weakest part of the product, and I tend to agree. I did most of my testing in a Win9X environment, and for the most part the drivers performed properly, but several times the system froze up on me as I was fooling around with the reverb effects in the control panel. A few more times during my testing, the system either locked up during a game, or a game would boot me right out without warning or error messages.

Upgrading to the latest driver revision was a hassle and did NOT occur as per the directions in the given readme files. After upgrading I couldn?t even enable the MP3 acceleration feature any more, and the systray icon became disabled permanently. I ended up reinstalling the whole sound card from scratch, and still could not get the systray icon to display properly. In spite of all efforts, I was never able to get a small handful of games of games to run properly with the Santa Cruz installed (Tony Hawk?s Pro Skater 2 being one of those titles? DAMN). "

 

[Workin']

That's funny, when I had an Audigy in my system it would randomly hang and reboot several times a day. Now that I have a Santa Cruz in there it hasn't hiccuped even once (in over 3 months). I don't know where 7757524 found that review, but all the reviews of the TBSC I have seen praise it's drivers in comparison to Creative's crashmasters.

Unfortunately there is no live drive type thing for the TBSC available that I know of.

 

[paralazarguer]

Creative's drivers are solid. If you are having trouble, it's with the via chipest you have it plugged into most likely. Just because YOU had stability problems doesn't mean that it's common. It is common with VIA but that's because they make low quality chipsets. See here

 

[jaeger66]

7757524, please stop referring to articles you wrote in order to support your claims. The Santa Cruz's drivers are as solid as they come. The Audigy's are raw and problematic. The Audigy's 100db SNR claim is a lie, and the 24/96 claim is a severe stretching of the truth.

 

[jaeger66]

And the Live/VIA issues were mostly due to BIOS writers trying to compensate for the Live's woeful drivers. This has been hacked to death here and other places, so please get a clue before you post.

 

[kgraeme]

Originally posted by: 7757524
Creative's drivers are solid. If you are having trouble, it's with the via chipest you have it plugged into most likely. Just because YOU had stability problems doesn't mean that it's common. It is common with VIA but that's because they make low quality chipsets. See here

You'll get no argument from me that VIA's chipsets are sketchy, but I think that you have to allow that Creative shares a little fault as well. How else can you explain that swapping a Creative card out and replacing it with a Santa Cruz clears up the problems? VIA created the problem on their chipset, but Creative's drivers are the catalyst for the crashing.

 

[MasterHoss]

Your comments are incorrect. VIA does not produce inferior chipsets. If I recall, you got upset when people called Compaq "crap" and now you're going to do the same thing by attacking VIA? Moreover, there are still several Compaq models that still use the VIA chipset; therefore, you are implying that Compaq is also inferior, right?

Additionally, I helped a friend who is using an Audigy Platinum eX with is Intel 850-based mobo (he has the actual Intel mobo). Yes, I know what the hell I'm doing and know what to do and what to try to fix sound card related problems... long story short, although Creative's drivers for their sound cards are more reliable then, say, Hercules', people using an Audigy with various mobos (VIA or Intel based) have had problems.

For the record, I use the Audigy Platinum in a VIA-based mobo and have no problems.

 

[jaeger66]

Actually it seems more people having Audigy issues are using Intel chipsets. The SOD is almost exclusively an Intel occurance.