Hi,

Purchased X-fi 460 and Audigy 2 ZS SB0350 from ebay, super cheap + Audigy 2 is Dos compatible I understand and the X-fi is not but does have some advantages over the Audigy 2? , almost went with the Xonar might switch to that eventually to keep everything ASUS

Owned various Sound blaster Live and live value cards in the past, Noticed many years ago while Running TMNT in Mame the Sblive did in fact improve the FPS over no SBlive.

I've just finished building a Windows XP PC for older games (I have a Ems Topgun 2 and i like a game called Tanktics)
Started off with Windows 2000 but could not find a decent web browser for getting updates etc.

Asus MB
Amd x4 2.60Ghz
4GB Ram
Asus Nvidia Gts 250 Gcard

Thought i might test the sound cards in Mame as i noticed the FPS gain many years ago, my idea would be to drop the CPU frequency until the FPS drops then try the cards out to see the FPS gain if any.

Any interest in results was thinking of just recording the FPS on an old camera?

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Edit with TEST
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Did some basic speed testing really wanted to drop the CPU speed to around 200-500MHz but would not allow it and had to switch boards to get the Audigy to work did not test the X-fi yet .

Pc/CPU: Asus m2n68-vm, 1600mhz x2 x8.0 200mhz, 3gb Cpu/Memory timings set as slow as possible
OS: Windows 7Sp1, Indexing, Firewall, AV, backup etc, services disabled
Test App: Mame, 10 runs each manual play frame limit off (Outrun)

Results (higher is faster)

Audigy 2 ZS: 116.117%
Onboard: 119.899%
Nosound processing: 129.268%

Notes

Unexpectedly the onboard sound had a few Speed spikes which level off/dont show in the results dropped below 80% then to 130%+ a few times,
I would say sound quality was not as good as SB, and SB was more stable % in game.

No sound:

1/ 127.15% 94s, 2/ 127.26% 87S, 3/ 132.39% 102S, 4/ 129.02% 87s, 5/ 128.89% 89S, 6/ 128.17% 94s, 7/ 128.03% 88s, 8/ 130.65% 92S, 9/ 130.31% 89s, 10/ 130.81% 86s
T: 1292.68, A: 129.268%

SB Audigy 2 ZS SB0350 (Creative Driver: 6.0.1.1377):

1/ 118.90% 96s, 2/ 117.74% 111s, 3/ 111.98% 89s, 4/ 113.22% 90S, 5/ 116.59% 108s, 6/ 119.15% 107S, 7/ 116.95% 88s, 8/ 117.61% 87s 9/ 115.26% 87s, 10/ 113.77% 92s
T: 1161.17, A: 116.117%

Onboard sound(VT1708B High Definition Audio) (Driver: Microsoft 6.1.7601.17514):

1/116.80% 94s, 2/117.13% 88S, 3/113.13% 94s, 4/123.86% 93S, 5/123.52% 90s, 6/123.56% 90s, 7/118.81% 89s, 8/117.75% 91s, 9/119.71% 96s, 10/124.72 96S
T:1198.99, A: 119.899

S = Length of test
T = Total %
A = Mean Value