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REVIEWS

The sound card market has changed radically over the past 18 months. Gone are the days when an old Sound Blaster 16 compatible card would suffice, and gone are the days when the sound card was the single most unappreciated and abused item in consumer’s systems. The sound card market nowadays is highly competitive, with manufacturers vying for consumer dollars with the latest chipsets and whiz-bang technology. In such an environment how can a relatively unknown brand name such as Shark Multimedia with a low-end card compete? Quite well, as their latest offering, the Predator 3D PCI displays.

The card itself is very small, being vertically shorter than every other card in my system and horizontally about half as long as a Voodoo 2 card. This is important for people like me who have motherboards with CPU slots ridiculously close to their PCI slots. Installation was somewhat problematic as I found the card would not fit into its slot. Some gentle persuasion from a needle file followed by some not-so-gentle insertion into the slot remedied the problem. After that it went smoothly, Plug N Play took care of the rest and the drivers sorted themselves out.

The first thing I tested was a selection of .wav files that I played through media player. The sound quality was very sharp and clear, though static reared its ugly head when I pumped up the volume. For low to medium volumes however (standard game playing volumes) there was no problem of the sort. The two cans of crap I lovingly refer to as speakers certainly can’t have helped the static either, so overall I give the sound quality the thumbs up. I then ran an audio CD through the card and once again the sound was very clear.

The card was then put to test on over half a dozen games, including Starcraft, Total Annihilation, Quake 2, Unreal, Jedi Knight and Jane’s F15. All performed well, as can be expected of a Directsound compatible card. There were no compatibility glitches, and quality was generally good. One slight concern however was the appearance of severe static when Quake 2 was started sometimes. The problem was fixed by simply restarting the game, so it was not a huge problem, but it was annoying nonetheless.

The final test was of the A3D capabilities of the card. These were unfortunately a great disappointment for me, though it was more a fault of A3D in general rather than this card in particular. On both Unreal and Jedi Knight the A3D enhanced sound was unbelievable, it sounded about as brilliant as could be imagined with only 2 speakers, but with a terrible cost. It sucked the power out of my CPU like a mosquito on speed. I noticed a considerable drop in frame rate on Jedi Knight, and even more so on Unreal. Tests showed it to be in the 30-40% region, and that’s just too much to justify the improved sound depth. However, I am running this on a K6-200, which is right on the minimum requirements for A3D, and as such I would imagine the problem would not be as apparent for P2 owners.

The card comes with the OEM version of Jedi Knight entitled Pathways to the Force, it contains the first few levels from the full game. The manual is easy to read and follow. The card also comes with the standard modem, CD, and speaker connectors on board, but has an unfortunate lack of jacks on the back. It has no auxiliary jack, thus limiting it to 2 speakers. It has the obligatory gameport, along with microphone and generic line in jacks, and the single line out jack.

All in all this is not the best card on the market, but it was never intended to be. At RRP $30 it is one of the cheaper PCI A3D card out there, and is aimed squarely at the lower end market. If you can afford them, Sound Blaster Live or Diamond Monster Sound are certainly better cards, but if your budget is tight, or you feel your hard-earned bucks would be better spent elsewhere, this is quite possibly the best value sound card you could buy.

Reviewed by AJ Dunlop