Install it in your PC and look for vendor ID, device ID in card properties.

This chip is probably rebranded Creative chip (same as on Dell OEM SB0200). Han Jammer have/had also this card (with drivers).

yeah... most definitely fake x3
judging by it having an alc650 that big chip is probably just on there for show and does nothing at all.

imi wrote on 2022-03-30, 09:11:

yeah... most definitely fake x3
judging by it having an alc650 that big chip is probably just on there for show and does nothing at all.

Big chip is PCI bridge

that might very well be, I assumed maybe the alc650 may be able to connect to PCI directly.

but yeah, it's always funny to me they go through that much effort, everyone specifically looking for an aureal card should spot the fake immediately x3

ALC650 is an AC97 codec chip (DAC+ADC+mixer). The Vortex3 is some rebranded other chip but what exactly I don't know, PCI IDs will tell what it should be in reality.

I'd be very curious to find out what that card actually is.

if u have a machine with windows xp put it in there try running snappy driver installer and see if it comes up with any drivers in its data base.

imi wrote on 2022-03-30, 11:13:

that might very well be, I assumed maybe the alc650 may be able to connect to PCI directly.

but yeah, it's always funny to me they go through that much effort, everyone specifically looking for an aureal card should spot the fake immediately x3

You can find forum posts about those cards from the early 2010's when very few people were looking for a Vortex2 and they still were pretty cheap. I really wonder why they even went through the trouble of making up that chip?

I think that it might be the real thing. Only way to tell is to install it with the older drivers and see if it gets picked up.
It might be an old stock of chips that never made it into cards (Either QA, market dried up (because of Creative) it was stocked and forgotten until 2010 when a chinese integrator saw a chance, bought the chips for pennies and did these cards.
My other option is that it could be a Cmedia 8739 variant -one of the cheaper ones - that were pretty obiquitous, wildly available and could be had for a smile rebranded as an "aureal" to make it look better, since the other chip's only capability is converting the I2C signals into analog audio and viceversa.

Edit: What makes me think that it could be the real thing is that 24Mhz crystal rather than the usual 14.31818 other sound cards use.

Put it in a system with Linux and run in the terminal "lspci", it'll probably tell you exactly what chip that is, and Linux will already have a driver for it built in.

Hi everyone, sorry I didn't get to update you all, I had some real life stuff.
Anyways, just like I thought this "aureal vortex 3" is a remark (duh 😉 ). It's in truth a creative chip. Why did they even bother to remark them? Doesn't make much sense, even more so when the vortex 3 doesn't exist.

the even more puzzling part to me then is using an AC'97 chip as mixer/DAC... bizzare use of scrap bin parts 😁
why even go through the effort to make a PCB and produce a card like this is beyond me though, the sole reason would be to scam people looking for an aureal card... I can't believe that would work often enough to make it worthwhile?

Nearly all the PCI controllers used AC97 codec for their analog bits since they were always better quality than whatever could be integrated into main chipset. I think only CMI had a chip with integrated analog bits.

huh, I didn't realize that, but yeah on the SB live are already AC'97 chips, I never actually made that connection that they're basically the same as the onboard AC'97 chips, I always assumed they were specifically made to interact with motherboard chipsets and not actually be used on sound cards.
though I haven't seen an Aureal card with AC'97 before, I guess it's just ultimately the same thing as the ADC/DAC chips used previously just standardized.

the more you know 😀 I never looked that deep into PCI sound cards ^^

All Vortex based cards I have seen use an AC97 chip for the analog bits too. But yeah, AC97 only defined the analog aspects and an unified interface that PCI controllers can use for it, reducing costs and increasing sound quality. HDAUDIO expands the same concept, more channels etc. but ultimately same thing, a standard interface to analog functions and connectivity. Most of the chips are compatible with one another, with only differences in mixer side. It is up to the controller driver to support all the different AC97/HDA codec chips that may be used with it.

yeah, just looked up the datasheet, oh well 😁 like I said, I guess I had a misconception about how AC'97 chips were implemented.