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Electronics : TRUST SC-5250 5.1 SOUND CARDRating: - Doesnt like my computerespecially games.... after going through the hassle of making sure there are no conflicts etc , playing music was ok , but compared to the on board sound card which is actually noisy in the background, it would be an improvement! I play Pacific Fighters and the like , this usually causes the computer to glitch then crash,,ie restart , which is annoying to say the least , I am going to remove it and go back to the noisy one for the time being. I dont like giving bad criticism but in this case I have to , sorry Trust. Rating:  - Utter garbageAvoid this piece of junk at all costs. 1) Main problem for me: Digital optical in isn't digital (and this is why I bought it, to get digital input from a minidisc deck). Sure it has an optical in SOCKET, on a daughtercard. But it appears that the daughtercard "helpfully" does the D-to-A conversion for you, so the main card never sees any digits at all; certainly there's no way of capturing the input other than re-sampling the analogue. 2) Paper manual is useless, poorly translated, incomplete, self-inconsistent 3) No help at all in any of the shoddy utilities (unless you count a window popping up with pictures of the buttons with text names alongside them as "help" - duh, I can find that out anyway by hovering over them) 4) Online help talked about utilities which didn't exist, or misrepresented ones which did 5) Their Tech Support is worse than useless in that it gives you hope! After 8 days they replied to say "send it back then". Don't worry - I will! Shame I can't give it no stars at all... Rating:  - Will work with XP and VISTA, excellent valueInstalled on an Athlon 2600 with XP SP2. It is essential to first disable any motherboard audio, and any remnants of other sound card drivers. Initial sustained high CPU activity, preventing good operation, is caused by IRQ sharing and needs attention. Note that the device will say "no conflicts" but sharing is not a conflict according to XP! Run "msinfo32" to see what is shared. IRQ cannot be set manually, so the solution is to move the PCI card to slot 2 or 3 (slot 1 being the VGA slot) rather than a high-numbered slot. For both XP and VISTA, optical in is set by default to the wrong connector and can cause an audio recorder to hang, but this is easily corrected using the excellent intuitive mixer included for XP and built-in to VISTA. Documentation about these quite likely problems really should be included, but I'm not quibbling given the simply astounding value for money. Perfect normal soundcard behaviour doesn't miss a beat under full audio load either in or out. Thus I get perfect recording of 100% modulated optical in, which is the reason I bought this card to replace an Extigy with its constrained USB 1.1 bandwidth. There are loads of connectors, good quality components, and I thoroughly recommended this provided you can find your way around the BIOS and know what an IRQ is. Rating: - Misleading, TemperamentalAlthough the latest drivers form the C-Audio or Trust websites now work OK on Windows XP, there are few things to like about this card. Firstly it does NOT do 5.1 surround through the digital outputs (coax or optical) - only via 3x stereo analogue jacks: a major letdown for me. Secondly, I found that the card produced a lot of clicks during playback. My previous optical soundcard (a Gamesurround Fortissimo II - not exactly high-end) has no such problems so I don't think this is down to my machine. This card also drops the digital optical link when no audio is playing; so when you start some audio there is a slight delay before you hear any sound, which jumps into life a few ms late. Highly annoying!! Rating: - Arggghh... Problematic card!!!This is a 5.1 optical S/PDIF card, works magic on windows 98 and ME but works **** on Windows 2K and XP! (C-Media knows about the issues but there are several people affected by the problemns) I really liked it on my win ME computer... It uses the advanced C-MEDIA sound chips, it doesnt have a onboard MIDI synthezizer which for me was the main down point as i like making music. However it does have a MPU-401 to plug in a external MIDI unit. It has a doughter board with the optical socets on it. It is not compulsory to use it but it means another expasions slot used. This is so simple to set-up. But will cause MAJOR head aches if u are upgrading from a previous C-media product, this includes the motherboards AC97' chip made my C-Media! Seroiusly. Not worth the risk if you have windows 2k or XP. Though a REALLY good choice for min ME or 98 (not really sure about 95). So in a wrap: BUY IT if you have windows ME or 98 DONT BOTHER with windows 2K or XP |
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