Reviews
O
nce a solid purveyor of
hardware audio accelera-
tion, Philips/VLSI has made
an abrupt reversal with its new
Ultimate Edge PSC724 soundcard.
The 24-bit Ultimate Edge dumps
the Thunderbird Avenger DSP that
Philips used in its older Acoustic
Edge soundcard for the ubiquitous
VIA Envy24GT chip. A similar
VIA chip is used to power the M-
Audio Revolution 7.1, AudioTrak
Prodigy 7.1, and a host of other
competing cards.
Note that the word “powers”
does not mean that the aforemen-
tioned chip does any actual audio
processing. No. The Envy24GT is
essentially a PCI bus-mastering
chip that handles the flow of data
between the audio converters and
the PCI bus. Any crunching of
data for positional audio, reverb,
and other such effects is per-
formed by the CPU.
When we test soundcards (an
increasingly dying breed) in the
Maximum PC Lab, we’ve found
that the software, drivers, and
algorithms often have a huge
impact on the way a card performs
and sounds. It’s clear from our
tests that Philips spent a consider-
able amount of time polishing its
drivers and supporting applica-
tions. Of the Envy24 cards we’ve
reviewed to date, the Ultimate
Edge has the most advanced audio
applets and controls we’ve seen.
The controls are centralized, easy
to understand, and much betterthan the competitors’ offerings.
Audio quality is a slightly dif-
ferent story. The card uses a pair
of Wolfson Microelectronics
WM8766 24-bit 192kHz codec
chips to convert digital to analog.
The same codecs are used in
AudioTrak’s Prodigy 7.1, which
explains the audio similarities
between the two. In subjective
listening tests using high sample-
rate audio, we found the Ultimate
Edge sounded a little dull when
compared with an Audigy 2
ZS. (We felt similarly about the
Prodigy 7.1.) We were able to
EQ the Ultimate Edge to compen-
sate for the flatness, but even so,
the Audigy 2 ZS maintains a
slight edge.
In gaming, the Ultimate Edge
holds its own in sound quality,
even though it doesn’t support
Creative’s proprietary EAX3 and
EAX4. But you pay a steep price in
performance. We’ve wondered for
a long time now whether acceler-
ated soundcards would go the
way of the MPEG2 decoders. With
gigahertz to burn, we’ve reasoned,
do you really need a DSP?
It sure looks like it. We used
our standard Athlon 64 FX-51 test
bed and ran 3DMark03 , UT2003 ,
Quake III Arena , and Comanche
in 5.1 mode (the highest the
Ultimate Edge supports) and saw
10 percent frame rate penalties.That’s pretty painful, especially
when you consider the perfor-
mance hit in another way: If you
spent $500 on your videocard, a
10 percent hit in frame rates is
going to reduce performance to
the equivalent of a $400 video-
card. The same reduction is also
going to affect your CPU, effec-
tively knocking it down a speed
grade or two.
This may make gamers reel in
horror, but a massive counter-
trend is rearing its head that may
ultimately render DSPs worth-
less: Games may stop supporting
them. Id’s Doom 3 , for example,
does all the audio processing on
the CPU. Valve’s Half Life 2 and
GSC’s S.T.A.L.K.E.R. are expected
to do the same. If this practice
continues, a hardware accelerated
card won’t make any difference
whatsoever in your gaming.
—GORDON MAH UNG96 MA XIMUMPC DECEMBER 2004
Philips Ultimate Edge PSC724
A complete alternative to Sound Blaster arrives,
but with a significant cost in performanceGood value, integrated control panel.STRAWBERRY JAMTOE JAM
Eats CPU cycles.$70, http://www.philips.comMA XIMUMPCVERDICT 7
The Ultimate Edge drops Philips’
Thunderbird line of DSPs for a VIA chip that
offloads a considerable amount of work onto the CPU.DARE to COMPARE
ULTIMATE
EDGE
AUDIGY 2 ZS
PERCENTAGE
DIFFERENCE
3DMark03 - - -
No sound (fps) 50.1 49.1 2.0%
24 sounds (fps) 38.3 43.6 -12.2%
60 sounds (fps) 34.1 38.1 -10.5%
UT2003 Demo - - -
Software 3D (fps) 70.0 81.5 -14.1%
Hardware 3D (fps) 62.7 71.2 -12.0%
Hard ware 3D + EAX (fps) 62.0 67.4 -8.0%
Quake III Arena (fps) 240 265 -9.4%
Comanche (fps) 53.6 59.82 -10.4%
Best scores are bolded. We used our standard Athlon 64 FX-51 test bed with an
ATI Radeon 9800 Pro (Cat 4.9 drivers), an ASUS SK8N using the nForce3 150 chip-
set, a Western Digital 2500JB, and 1GB of Corsair Micro.