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Best bet for basic workstation sound?

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First post, by calvin

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On my dual Pentium 2 box running Windows 2000, I'd like sound. The problem is that the sound cards I have either aren't appropriate fits for the system, or are goddamn flaky pieces of shit. Essentially, workstations of the time didn't really have fancy audio like Vortexes or Audigies, but rather, basic stuff like ESS or Crystal. The problem is I have three cards all unsuited for it:

* SoundBlaster 16 CT2470: A robust card, but it's a complete waste in NT or 2000 because this revision has a real OPL. A bit too gamer for this build.

* OPTi 82c933: More the speed for this build, but a bit too anachronistic with dated drivers. The drivers are for NT 4 and basically try to munge an ISA PnP card onto a PnP unaware OS. This confuses Windows 2000, which IS PnP aware, greatly.

* ForteMedia FM801 (U801A-PCI card) - What a goddamn piece of shit. It works, but it's like the sound buffer never gets filled up properly... and it constantly locks up. I wonder if the drivers are even SMP aware.

Basically, I'm in a bit of a pickle with picking. Ideally I'd prefer to get either something that works with Windows' built in drivers, or is a known quantity like a Live or even Vortex, because this is an SMP system and I think a lot of third party sound (which is inherently time sensitive) drivers struggle with that. I'm thinking an ESS1869, or perhaps a lower end Live?

2xP2 450, 512 MB SDR, GeForce DDR, Asus P2B-D, Windows 2000
P3 866, 512 MB RDRAM, Radeon X1650, Dell Dimension XPS B866, Windows 7
M2 @ 250 MHz, 64 MB SDE, SiS5598, Compaq Presario 2286, Windows 98

Reply 2 of 5, by KCompRoom2000

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+1 for Sound Blaster Live!, I know you want a card with built-in drivers so I'm suggesting this because I've had good experiences with the included drivers on Windows 2000, there are some differences between models so you may want to get one that's not OEM just to prevent driver issues, a list of SB Live! models can be found on this link.

For an ISA card, maybe a Sound Blaster AWE64 would do because I know you don't want a real OPL chipset, but if that's also considered overkill, maybe a later Vibra16 card or a Sound Blaster 16 WavEffects would work since those may be new enough to use CQM yet old enough to satisfy for built-in audio support for Windows 2000.

An Esoniq AudioPCI is another good PCI-based option since those cards were mass-produced for OEMs and have good driver support (from what I've heard).

Reply 3 of 5, by chinny22

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Got a SB Live Value in my Duel P3 600 Server, Works fine, both when it ran NT4 and 2000.
Card came out of the family's Celeron 500 so roughly era correct as well. (Got that around 99-2000)

The Ensoniq Audio PCI, aka SoundBlaster 64 PCI is also a good call, Was the on-board sound on my P2 400 I got in 1998 and gave no trouble in 9x/NT4/2k

Reply 5 of 5, by calvin

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For closure: I found a sound card for cheaply when I stopped by a large flea market: A SIIG SoundWave 7.1 based on some CMI chip. It's a bit new, but it's compatible with 2000 at least, and has drivers that don't keel over in SMP. It'll do for now.

2xP2 450, 512 MB SDR, GeForce DDR, Asus P2B-D, Windows 2000
P3 866, 512 MB RDRAM, Radeon X1650, Dell Dimension XPS B866, Windows 7
M2 @ 250 MHz, 64 MB SDE, SiS5598, Compaq Presario 2286, Windows 98

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