3DsoundSurge Review: Xitel StormVX

Important Info:

Card By : Xitel
Price : $ 79.99
API Support : DirectSound, DS3D, A3D, Direct Input (Joystick)
S/N Ratio : Better than 94dB
Rated : 8.0
Award : *Surge Of Approval*

Minimum System Requirements:

- Windows 95/98
- Pentium PC 100 MHz
- 8MB RAM (16MB Recommended)
- 256 KB cache
- 5MB Minimum Free Hard Disk Space
- 1 available PCI 2.0 compliant slot

Update : The lack of EAX support and only 8 3D Streams make this card a poor choice for anyone that cares about 3D sound in games.

I would like to thank Ben from Xitel for waiting on this review and for sending us the card to review for our readers. As many of you may know, Xitel is a leading PCI soundcard manufacturer. Showing their faces at the 1997 Games Developers Conference, the original Storm gave Xitel an excellent reputation. Here's to you Ben... cheers! And now... on with the review.

The box is small... kind of like a computer software box. The StormVX has a cool but plain cover to it. I guess that lightning is supposed to show you how powerful this card really is, or then again it might just be a storm in the California area :). Inside you'll see the Storm doesn't come with many booklets. Although you will see the Installation CD cover which has a 2 page quick start installation guide attached to the cover. That's basically all you need to start pumping this baby through your home theater system or speakers, which ever setup you prefer to go deaf on.

As far as hardware goes, StormVX pumps as many as 8 3Dstreams of audio at a rate of 48khz, (better than CD quality) and which will accelerate the sound in your games. With that advantage, they also added a nice 64 voice wavetable midi synthesizer with 128 musical instruments. The wavetable on the StormVX is built in and you cant connect any spare wavetable board. The midi does hurt the card, due to it being CPU dependent. While listening to a midi file, I noticed skipping and instrument definition loss while having a couple of applications open. Setting the midi controller on the 64 voice pro quality will make it more CPU consuming.

Xitel jacked up this card with a Microphone Jack, Line In/Out Jacks, Headphones/Speaker Jack. By having 2 sets of speakers, the line out jack and speaker jack could be used together to get a cool surround sound feel. You won't get any sort of extra independent control, but you do get a cool feedback from the extra set (Editor's note: This will not give you four speaker positioning). S/N ratio on this card is better than 94dB (meaning no hissing or unwanted noise from card to speaker) Click here for a super detailed picture of the board.

The installation was a breeze. Simply, dropping the card into (Which is about 25-40% smaller than the MonsterSound) its PCI slot and booting the computer up, it all worked perfectly. Since the StormVX is plug and play, you wont run into the kind of hassle which beginners tend to get into. Plug and play lets Win95/98 catch new devices easier than to manual configuration for it... making it less time installing for users.

After it detects the card, windows 95 asks the user to "Insert the StormVX CD into the CD-ROM drive". When this occurs you may have to swap your Windows CD and your StormVX CD a couple of times. While it copies what it needs you may hear a pop sound, that would mean your speakers blew out! Just kidding, it usually means win95/98 recognizes the drivers and has enabled the card for use. Installation had no hassles no problems... period.

A very cool configuration it is. By setting your wavetable mode on 64 Voice Pro Quality, you will get maximum instrumental definitions. 64 voice pro quality is the highest quality of the three, but make sure you have more than the minimum system requirements for that option. As you choose lower qualities, it will be less CPU hungry but offer less instrumental definition. Reverb and Chorus effects are fantastic options! By adding reverb, the midi music will start to echo as if it played in halls. The Chorus adds that treble feel to it. You can tailor those options depending on your taste. These days, Midi is not too important in games, so you wont be using the wavetable too much in that respect. But then again, DirectX 6 incorporates a new option (DirectMusic) that will enable programmers to have more control of midi in PC games. If want more about the midi, we have provided a MP3 file of the Final Fantasy Battle midi running under the StormVX wavetable. See the Wavetable Demo chart below!

Hmmm lets see A3D, DirectSound3D... where can you go wrong? You CANT, due to the fact that StormVX supports both popular 3D APIs. When purchasing a soundcard, make sure you see support for one or both of these API s on the box. Directsound3D is accelerated by the StormVX hardware. Performance is also enhance by the StormVX being a PCI card and PCI (being much faster than ISA) will give you a few FPS here and there. More offloading from the CPU results in better gameplay for the gamer. Directinput, which is an extension of DirectX is used for joysticks, which also falls under the accelerated category.

A3D will blow you away! For those of you who were wondering what's so good about this A3D stuff you should buy this card and play either Jedi Knight or Unreal in order to hear what everyone is ranting about. While playing Descent: Freespace (A3D title), it was clear to me where the enemies were coming from. From right to left, from behind you to in front, it sounds REAL! And to think, the StormVX only uses a 2 speaker setup. Make sure you position them in that "sweet spot" to get the full affect. You can also use the headphones jack in conjunction with the line out jack.

StormVX lacks in software. Xitel decided to make a gamer's card... but with no games included. Along with no games, you don't get any music application or such. The only thing you'll actually see is the A3d demos which come with every A3D based card out there. This does hurt the overall package of the card, but they had to leave the software out in order to keep the price down. Besides, who would want a couple of foul demos, if your a hardcore gamer, you'll most likely have the a3d enabled games in waiting.

Well, I personally tested this card on Descent:Freespace, Unreal, and Jedi Knight. I can't give any kind definition to how it plays, but I can point out, it sounds real! (As if you didn't know that already) Every Directsound3d, A3D game will work with this card. You won't see frame rate losses when using Directsound3D or A3D unless you enable more 3Dstreams than the card actually has. A good example to this is unreal... unreal gives you the choice of setting up to 16 3Dstream sources, but since the vortex1 chipset only supports 8, the card will drop the 3Dstreams into software mode (Software mode doesn't sound as good as hardware processed... It will decrease performance). As for all you DOS gamers out there, feast your eyes on StormVX dos support! When playing a DOS game, you wont have play inside windows itself, (Monster Sound Series)but instead you can go straight to dos or even restart to DOS. What StormVX does is set a command in your autoexec.bat file to enable the commands for DOS usage. It's truly a Gamers card!

I played around with this card for a while, it was definitely a gamers card... for you musicians out there, this ain't the card for you. But for those gamers who tend to play play play till they drop, (yes, your average hardcore gamer) then my friend, this is the card of your choice. Midi did hurt the card and so did the software, but there's to many pros on the StormVX to give it a bad rating. Overall, this card deserves a 8.0, receiving the *Surge Of Approval* award.