Installation

Uponing opening the box, you'll find the small, blueish SQ2500 board, a large manual, and some CDs. The CDs are the Vortex Drivers CD, full versions of Heretic II and Drakan: Order of the Flame, and a 7 level OEM Slave Zero CD. The manual is a large guide for all the features of both the SQ1500 and SQ2500 sound cards, and a nice tutorial for installation and Aureal Vortex Control Panel. It's nice to see a real manual. My Stealth 3 video card came with a 2 page install guide, so Aureal definately gets points in my book here.

I also ran into my first problem here. The driver CD wouldn't work in my CD-ROM (an 8X Goldstar). I'm not sure if it was a CD error or my CD-ROM (I'm betting it was the CD-ROM because this happens with some CDs). But either way, its not a big issue. I just downloaded the latest Aureal drivers and installed. Installation went smoothly, all the hardware devices were detected and I didn't even need to reboot. No IRQ conflicts or anything.

Then another issue hit me when I booted Unreal Tournament in A3D 2.0. Apparently my SQ2500 didn't like my 75MHz bus speed (37.5 MHz PCI clock) because as soon as I tried to start a deathmatch, it locked up. Setting my bus to 83.3MHz (with a 33.3 PCI clock) fixed the lock-ups, and all the A3D games and such run smoothly now. Overall, a good installation, with only some minor hold-ups which were my fault, not the card's.

Page 3: Sound Support and Connectors