Audio Performance
Now let us look at the performance of this card compared to the other two. There should not be a major difference between these cards, except that the Audigy can use EAX HD while the others cannot, this could boost or lower performance compared to the other cards. Lets see how the Santa Cruz does in this test:
Well with no EAX we see the cards perform the same, with a very slight loss in performance compared to not having any audio. With EAX enabled the results get a little strange, if we pick the Audigy as being at what it should when using EAX HD then either the Live 5.1 or the Santa Cruz is not performing as it should, as both cards only have EAX 1.0 and 2.0. The Live looks like it is trying to emulate EAX 3 in software and as a result is performing badly. The Santa Cruz seems to be ignoring EAX HD commands and just doing what it can in hardware. Either way the Santa Cruz performs just as well as the 'standard' Creative cards.
Many people have criticized Creative sound cards, and especially the Live series of cards, as being PCI bus hogs. The Audio quality tests seem to show this as both the Live and Audigy showed noticeable stutter in playing DVD movies. Another area that uses the PCI bus is video capturing. Capturing uncompressed YUV2 video at 720X480 (DVD Resolution) with Stereo Audio can easily take 20+ MBps for capture and can definitely put a strain on the PCI bus. So we tested capturing 30 minutes of uncompressed video to our 40GB Maxtor 7200RPM (D740X) hard drive connected to the Highpoint 372 controller on the motherboard to see how many drops each sound card created. Lets see the results:
| Sound Card |
Frames Captured |
Drops |
| Turtle Beach Santa Cruz: |
57075 |
2 |
| Creative Labs SB Live 5.1: |
57079 |
3 |
| Creative Labs SB Audigy: |
57074 |
2 |
We can see that there is little difference between these cards as there is only a 1 frame difference between cards. So this test shows that any of these cards is adequate for capturing video and audio. One other point about capturing audio/video, the Santa Cruz captured audio at a higher volume, so much so that no adjustments were needed in volume, unlike the Creative cards which require (in my opinion) a 300% increase in volume to equal the Santa Cruz.
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