VOGONS


First post, by Jorpho

User metadata
Rank l33t++
Rank
l33t++

The old Dell I mentioned in this thread has a PCI Turtle Beach sound card with a model number of TB400-2541-02. Googling this model number tells me nothing in particular.

Is this card at all useful compared to, say, a Sound Blaster Live? Does it have DOS drivers?

Reply 1 of 4, by squareguy

User metadata
Rank Oldbie
Rank
Oldbie

Very useful card. That is a Turtle Beach Santa Cruz. Great Sensaura support, quiet, sounds good, etc. Great for an early Windows system. DOS emulation sucks but I can't remember the last time I actually listened to that. I love playing Thief with that card for the A3D support through Sensaura.

Gateway 2000 Case and 200-Watt PSU
Intel SE440BX-2 Motherboard
Intel Pentium III 450 CPU
Micron 384MB SDRAM (3x128)
Compaq Voodoo3 3500 TV Graphics Card
Turtle Beach Santa Cruz Sound Card
Western Digital 7200-RPM, 8MB-Cache, 160GB Hard Drive
Windows 98 SE

Reply 2 of 4, by alexanrs

User metadata
Rank l33t
Rank
l33t

Read the review the customer gave it on this Amazon page. It can be made to work in DOS, but unlike the SB Live! emulation it will not give you the software wavetable synth without Windows. It does have a working wavetable header, which might be viewed as a plus. OPL seems bad, but not AudioPCI levels of bad. It is probably an OK card depending on what you want to do.

Reply 3 of 4, by sliderider

User metadata
Rank l33t++
Rank
l33t++

A fair card and still cheap because there are lots of them around thanks to OEM's like Compaq buying them by the ton. If you pay more than $10-$12 for one, it's too much. They're like the GeForce 4MX of sound cards. There are millions of them still out there and everybody has one to sell.

Reply 4 of 4, by ZanQuance

User metadata
Rank Member
Rank
Member

It's really great! My favorite gaming soundcard at the moment (that is, only until I finish these new Vortex2 drivers).
It works properly under XP with the 4193 drivers, full Sensaura feature support and acceleration in the CS4630 chip. A 20 and 18-bit codec on board for 6 channel input/output, a versa jack that can be set to whatever you would like it to be, and thanks to Sensaura Virtual Ear included with the 4193 drivers, your own custom HRTF profiles for gaming.
The OPL3 dos emulation is really bad though, it makes the Vortex2 sound practically spot on in comparison.