Games And 3D, Continued : Creative Audigy 2 ZS Notebook: High-end Sound in a CardBus Slot

Tom's Guide > News and Reviews > All Reviews > Computing > Creative Audigy 2 ZS Notebook: High-end Sound in a CardBus Slot

Games And 3D, Continued

By Jean-Pierre Roche, published on February 22, 2005
Source: Tom's Guide US | Keywords: creative, audigy, 2, zs, notebook | Themes: Business Notebooks

Contents

8. Test System And Audio Measurements
9. Behavior At 24 Bits/48 KHz
10. Behavior At 24 Bits/96 KHz
11. Behavior On Playback At 24 Bits/96 KHz (recording With E-MU 1820)
12. Games And 3D, Continued
13. In Practice

12. Games And 3D, Continued

For video games, we also ran tests on a Packard Bell laptop with a higher-performance video card. Its configuration is shown below.

Test system
Processor	Pentium 4A 2.66 GHz
Memory	512 MB of DDR
Graphics card	ATI Mobility Radeon 9600 64 MB
Hard disk	Fujitsu 40 GB, 4200 rpm, ATA100
Optical drive	DVD Teac 8X/24X
OS	Windows XP Home SP2
Version DirectX	9.0c

The results for processor utilization are in the same neighborhood - 12.6% with the built-in sound (AC97) and 6.3% using the Notebook, in a much more high-performance configuration since we were in stereo in the first case and 7.1 in the second.

In practical testing, the result with Quake 3 was unexpected: Performance showed up better with the built-in sound! But the cause was probably the switch from stereo to 7.1... And there's no comparison with the Notebook's sound, without any loss of performance. With Comanche 4, things returned to normal, with the Notebook taking the lead.

Needless to say, beyond the advantages it may have for processor utilization, the Notebook performs infinitely better with games than the built-in sound processing on a typical laptop, especially if you're using a multichannel reproduction system, beginning with 5.1. And in addition, moving to quality multichannel sound does not increase the CPU's workload.