What is the best sound card for Windows 98 Super Socket 7? 

Your testing is exhaustive and detailed and you answer many questions that people have wanted answered in a well-produced presentation. This is why RU-vid needs you.

Those were the times when reducing the audio quality got your better frame rate.

I have a "Phone Blaster" from Creative, which is a Modem and Sound Blaster 16 all in one. It's an ISA board that has the Vibra 16 Chipset, but ALSO has a real Yamaha YMF262 for true OPL3/Adlib, it also has a wavetable pinout. Blew my mind when I first saw it.

These results were eye opening. Very interesting indeed. Thank you for putting in all the testing time.

Yep got an Audigy 2 ZS over ten years ago and its still my primary sound stage. It just sounds better than most cards.

I had an OG SB Audigy 1 that I adored. Loved the sound that thing put out back in the day. I couldn't believe the difference when I installed it.

I own most of these cards (except for the Yamaha PCI and the Diamond Monster Sound) and I eventually stuck with the AWE64. I'm happy this video has somewhat validated my decision (from a performance standpoint). I threw the Ensoniq away. . . it was meh worthy. I have a Cirrus PCI based card that I never found drivers for.

I came from the future (2022) to say this video still rocks! Very useful! ♥ Ty

just the video I was looking for. and even better, a website with drivers for things I'm researching to buy for a retro build! thanks Phil!

The Yamaha PCI card is also the only PCI card with a real OPL core inside.

I still have my old Yamaha Waveforce 192XG sitting around. It had fantastic midi.

Thank you for taking all this time to bring these concise informative videos to us. It's highly appreciated, and I enjoy learning about these old cards. I would be really interested in a video based on all the little attachments and what all the headers and sockets do on these cards! Some have so many connectors and I just have no idea what most of them are for!

Another option is to plug the line-out of one of the sound cards into the line-in of the other, provided the second card supports line-in in both MS-DOS as well as Windows (the SB Live! for example doesn't).

I have an Audigy v1 (SB0090) card (with additional MIDI backplate) in my E8400 750 Ti XP/8.1 system, only like the Audigy 2 you've got, it's also got that sweet gold & black look. Sounds great when playing Colin McRae Rally 2005 with EAX sound over my Logitech X-230 2.1 speakers.

I'm quite excited Phil, having just completed my first designated "retro" build (XP-era, less expensive than Win 9x era at the moment), and I've just managed to get a new old stock Aureal SQ2500 OEM soundcard on ebay! From my research this model is the one with XP compatible drivers (and I have found them), so I am hoping to see if it will co-exist with my PCIe X-Fi based card. They both have quite complex support software as I understand so wish me luck! If not it may form the motivation for a Win9x SS7 build.

I'm still using the Audigy 2 ZS in my main machine with Windows 7, kinda weird seeing it in a Socket 7 retro video :D

You need to revisit this project, and do a signal to noise ratio test on the cards.

Greetings from Saskatchewan, Canada! I bought one of these Live! 5.1 (SB 0100) cards in 2002 and it was one of the best purchases I've ever made. The Audigy 2 ZS has been my "dream audio card" for years...

For myself, I currently use the following: Intel Core 2 Quad Q9650 XP: Sound Blaster Audigy SB0090 (the original version, not the ones with coloured connectors), with the latest driver that supports EAX 4.0. Celeron 400A 98se: Turtle Beach Montego II Aureal II PCI card for Windows & Yamaha Audician 32 ISA card for DOS.

I just recently acquired a SB X-Fi Titanium HD and it's hands down the best card I've ever had, and I have just about everything. But I use it to listen to music and watch movies right now, not games, it also is the only X-Fi without any windows XP(or older) support and it's rare and expensive but damn does it sound good.

Thank you, i didn't know about trick with WDM and VXD driver changing.

Sound Blaster Live! was my favorite card.

Hi phil gr8 reviews as always! As a Aureal fan myself i've run my sq2500 for many years now. Gr8 4 games & windows.. But the best Soundcard back in win98/XP era I think is the Santa Cruz (Turtle Beach) it had stable drivers in games, both in EAX & A3D, and it had gr8 sound Quality in win and also decent 4 work, Sound-editing... Plz review this if you have the chance!! //Cyhpr

If you have a motherboard with a VIA chipset (especially the 686B southbridge), don't use a SB Live! sound card because there was a bug which caused massive disk corruption. It was a known problem back in the day, but much of the information on it has been lost to time. You can still find a few bits of information on old forum discussions, but you may have to use archive.org since many of those websites are no longer in existence, or have since purged those topics. I experienced this problem first hand back in 2001 when I was upgrading from a Gateway 2000 to an AOPEN motherboard with a VIA chipset. I recycled my SB Live sound card and a few other parts to build a Duron 800 machine, and quickly ran into problems. Programs and data on my hard drive would randomly get corrupted and it took a dozen or so Windows reinstalls, lots of driver version swaps and research to figure it out. I ended up having to upgrade to a SB Audigy, at which point I didn't have any issues after that.

Amazing dedication Phil :) Also are you aware that on the audigy series cards there was a high quality driver project called the KX Audio project? It was aimed at professionals and audio producers. Apparently better for music, but the official creative drivers had better EAX and 3D sound support for games.

Very nice video, thanks :) I use a Gravis Ultrasound max on my P2 400mhz, sound blaster live on a boring xp machine, and sound blaster z on my modern machine. And sid chip and paula :)

Ah, Phil. Another great retro video! I have a Sound Blaster AWE64 gold and Sound Blaster Live! in my socket 7 build. My Pentium 166 is the one using an AWE32 + NEC XR385.

I've always wondered about the performance impact of various cards. I always thought a better card might be able to offload stress on the CPU to the point where the effect would be similar to no sound card. I have an original Audigy 2 in my PIII PC because that's what I had on hand from back in the day. It's nice to see that it's not a bad choice at all. I used the driver disc from Vogons, but recently found my original disc. I'll also have to make sure I have VxD enabled!

Such a nostalgic video.

Back then I used an Ensoniq AudioPCI. Great card

Little late to the party on this, but I was just building a P-II 400 which somebody had put a Audigy 2ZS into. I admit, it is a wonderful sounding card in windows, but no matter what I tried, I couldn't get the VXD drivers to work in DOS titles to save my life. I found my old Live Platinum, and it installed with absolutely no issues. This was my actual sound card I bought new in 1999 so it's period correct anyway. Win XP was the prominent OS by the time the Audigy 2 ZS was released.

My preference is towards the Aureal Vortex 2 cards (Diamond Monster MX300 is pretty neat) especially with the amazing 3D sound effects.I think there was a connection with 3Dfx and Aureal in that many of the founders of 3Dfx previously worked at Media Vision and also Aureal Semiconductor was a company that came out of the demise of Media Vision too.Wikipedia says it was a reincarnation of the bankrupt Media Vision.In a way what 3Dfx was to 3D graphics was what Aureal was to 3D sound effects.Too bad about their (Aureal's) unfortunate unfair demise. That Audigy 2 card sounded absolutely amazing though as you demonstrated in the video. However isn't out of the proper time frame as some people would prefer components of the 1999 era rather than using a component from several years later though it does work very very well.

The ESS AudioDrive (or at least the one I have) supports 3D sound pretty well ,and the drivers for it are included with Windows 98SE as-is.

Great video! Thank you for taking out the hassle of choosing! :)

Could you do a MIDI comparison between all the cards? I'm curious to know how the Yamaha XG cards sound against the Creative AWE64, Audigy, and Vortex 2 cards.

Another A3D fan here. I had the Monster Sound card for the longest time back in the day and I really, REALLY liked it. However there were not many games that supported it. That in mind, my absolute favorite Sound Card (before "current times") has to be the AWE32. I had the top-of-the-line model with the built-in memory slots and gold-plated RCA inputs (no 3.5mm jacks at all). I loved that thing to death. It sounded REALLY good through my amp. Got the AWE64 a few years after and it wasn't what I expected. Don't get me wrong the AWE64 still was/is a good card, just nowhere near the mind & ear blowing experience the AWE32 was.

I still own an original Aureal Vortex (first one) from 1998, I did pick up the Vortex 2 when I made my win 98 build many years ago though. Lucked out and scored it for £3 inc delivery off ebay. :p

Thanks Phil. It was interesting to see that ISA soundcards aren't necessarily behind PCI cards Performance-wise

I use the Audigy 2 ZS in my Windows XP retro computer (I actually just restored my original XP build from 2008). I have a Sound Blaster Live! 5.1 from our old Windows Me family computer, but currently a Sound Blaster PCI 64 is installed in my retro Windows 98 PC (that's what it came with). I'll be upgrading that. I'd love an Aureal Vortex card, but I sadly don't have any of those and they're not cheap to get.

For me the Ideal Windows 98 Sound card would be the AWE64 because I would be playing both Windows and Dos games but thats just me though. Or if I had to choose a PCI sound card I would get a SB PCI 128 because of the DOS compatibility. However this is an interesting test I never new that Sound cards could change the frame rate depending on the quality of sound.

Every driver for every Creative card made is still available.

The Yamaha 724 (DS-XG) has the best sounding MIDI Synth. If you use 4MB or 8MB soundfonts it sounds bets (out of all) in games that use MIDI audio (Descent, Descent 2, Carmageddon, Heroes, etc) A3D is good - not as good as Aureal cards, but close enough. Plus, most late dos games and win98 games don't really support 3D audio so that isn't really a defining criteria for super socket 7 soundcard selection. MIDI on the other hand is, since you WILL be playing lots of games that have MIDI music - so - if given the choice, go for the Yamaha PCI card. The Vortex cards are OK, but their MIDI synths are mediocre at best. The AWE64 has the best dos support, and also allows you to play wavetable MIDI music in DOS - something the other cards can't do.

I had a Turtle Beach Santa Cruz! Awesome card.

Great video! BTW Have you ever heard of the Turtle Beach DDL? It seems to be an XP up sound card... where the Audigy 2 lost support... the DDL offered A3D, and EAX support.

Great video. I am looking at building a system around the Audigy 2 SZ. I've always been a fan of SoundBlaster in particular the AWE64 Gold. Sound fonts are great however, I'm used to using a Roland SCC1 8-bit ISA card for GS MIDI alongside an the AWE64 Gold.

Nice video. You can build your own local network between modern and old computers to transfer files to the i386SX to work around FDD limit. I use such things a couple years ago and this works fine for me. Lan ISA cards with RJ45 is not so expensive to use them and it's better then cards with BNC connectors.

i have a audigy 1 and 2 also awe64 and awe32 so this video helps alot to choose what to use for my pentium pro system

I like the Santa Cruz turtle beach. It has the best SQ.

Wow, I wouldn't have thought that sound cards had such a significant impact on performance.

I love old creative sound card I have SB16 (non-pro with Sony 2x SCSI Drive), AWE32 Pro (with SoundFont RAM), Live 5.1 Value, Audigy ZS 2 Platinum (with External Rock)

For an SS7 machine , I would go with an ISA card , as you said the kind of games that you play on SS7 won't get much from things like EAX or A3D (SS7 isn't the platform for American Mcgee's Alice, or Wheel of TIme), DOS however will be a big factor. if the choice is PCI then I would probably go with a Sound Blaster Live or Audigy1 , while the Aureal cards sound nice and A3D is nice, as you've said there can be driver issues and I too had those issues too. Audigy2 is a mixed bag for me as far as this , the sound quality is indeed great (although to notice the difference between an Audigy1 and 2ZS is harder unless you're using decent headphones or speakers), getting the VXD drivers running can be a pain though. using 2 cards is an option , one just has to be careful regarding conflicts and different boards will react differently.

For some reason, i got a few of those Audigy 2ZS from work, they were all in the motherboards and cards recycling bin.

wish you would have had the platinum so you could have check out the front panel that comes with the a2zs.. it is awesome.. as for the dos and 98 the awe64 gold is so compatible with everything.. i love it, i have had both of these cards since they were new and still going strong.. no static or popping on my awe64.. thanks for you videos..

if ya playing period games i would say an A3D aureal 2 the REAL creators of EAX!

That was a nice comparison. The ol' Live still hold up to the more modern Audigy cards pretty well.There are a lot of variations though of the Live which offer different op amps, caps, etc.. which impacts the sound quality. The OEM cards are picky with drivers I have noticed and i think those are the cheaper, not quite as good sounding ones around. I don't think Creative ever did get the drivers nailed down for those cards after Win 2000 came out since they were focused on selling Audigy cards. I have all of these cards, except the Yamaha 718 card, and my Diamond Monster card is the first one I think, not the Monster MX300 that you have. I had a feeling that was an ESS card. Junk man... same thing as on-board audio, which actually now that I type this, I think I know why you have it. I thought about picking one of those 718's up since I love the 724's midi, but if it is just opl3, then I have cards with that already and would be a waist of $15 for me. The 724 I have really fell in love with. That card for DOS games has fantastic midi, though Blood has an attitude problem with that card, but Descent works fine. There are DOS drivers for that card, but I wasn't able to get those drivers to work with the card when I tried it and I suspect it probably has to do with the SBlink, which I do not have that cable and I don't think most people would have one or be able to find one, but if the game works in DOS mode under 98, then for the most part, they will work with sound. Hard to find card though, so not something to recommend unless that changes, but somehow I have managed to find 4 of them in computers over the last couple years.

Well i'll be damned i actually just purchased an Audigy 2 card at a flea market for like 1 euro. After watching this vid it feels like an absolute steal.

I think I used a TurtleBeach card during most of the 98 era. Switching to a SB Live afterwards.

SB PCI 128 has the best midi with its 8MB Wave table lol aw I miss that card.. luckliy I keep a VM open with the drivers installed to emulate it.

Hi Phil, great informative video as always. Your channel has inspired me to build a Super Socket 7 box of my own. :) It's all pretty much set up, though I have run into some issues. I can't for the life of me get the thing to post whenever I set the CPU clock speed above 300 mHz (which is odd, seeing the K6-III+ I'm using is rated for 450 mHz.. Any ideas what I might be doing wrong?

I have an Audigy 2, and it sounds exactly the same to me as the integrated "Crystal WDM Audio PCI" built into one of my Pentium II systems.

Is there any difference in performance between Audigy 2 and Audigy 2 ZS in a Windows 98 retro gaming PC? I found a Audigy 2 at 1/3 the price of a Audigy 2 ZS.

Hey Phil great video I have 2 audigy cards one is the regular audigy 2 and the other is the audigy 2 zs is there any major difference between the 2 as they both look identical ?

Phil, when you said that the Vortex 2 has a wavetable header which works in DOS, are you suggesting that a Vortex 2+wavetable approaches the performance, fidelity, and compatibility of using an AW-64 in DOS? I'm currently building an mATX SS7 98/DOS machine, so with my limited slots (3PCI + shared PCI/ISA) I'd like to pack the most functionality I can into the space available. If you have any advice I'd greatly appreciate it. Cheers. And thanks for the videos, I'm hooked!

My only sound card I have ever had was the Creative SB PCI64, quite OK IMHO, though ocassionally, trying to get it work (with some SW) was not that fun 🙂It worked fine with Windows apps and games (well, mostly), but using it with DOS games, it always bottlenecked the system.

Thanks Drivers 3 days Looking Live and 2Zs drivers, installed yesterday, and full drivers is the best.

Since my pentium 4 machine is already equipped with a soundblaster x-fi, I opted for the monster sound MX300 for my super socket 7 board and a soundblaster 16 with db60xg daughterboard.

I will say, these PCI cards are good even today. I have an SB0100 and I didn't realise just how old it is. Works fine in my linux machine :3

Hi Phil. Thank you for the interesting video.I would like to ask you if you can show the midi capabilities of the Yamaha soundcard with the XG chip? In the past i had a Yamaha DB50XG daughterboard, it was very nice!:-) Unfortunately you didn't talk about the midi sound of the cards. Thank you!

@PhilsComputerLab great video as always A+

Great video as usual, Phil. Very informative and well put together. I have an AWE 64 Gold, although I'm now looking at getting a 2 ZS. Do you have the 5.25 breakout box? I think it's SB0250. :)

With all these retro gaming builds you're doing, would you consider doing a build for retro console emulation?

The creatives had onboard ram and acceleration but yamaha wont be beaten for midi or fm synthesis, so why not install both? The first time i ever experienced real hifi sound was with the audigy 2zs and the Creative I-Trigue L3800 speaker system, im not joking, those two together are so damn good, the sheer clarity and richness of those speakers is mind blowing, sound stage is just perfect you can hear everything, bass hits to 32hz and top end 22,000hz, they are quality speaker and made of solid metal with two tweeters and a midrange in the LR speakers with separate subwoofer.

Hi Phil, what do you use to capture dvi output esp from the old games. Thx

i use Soundblaster live! cards for my P3 and P4 systems. because they are reasonably priced and sound good.

What about the original Vortex?

I just had a thought regarding Win9x builds too - the long-forgotten AMD Socket-A athlon board. These seem to have compatibility with Win9x and have interesting transitional features like having SATA alongside AGP and IDE connectors. Sadly having just completed my XP build I don't have the funds right now.

I would recommend VLSI Thunderbird 128 PCI Sound Card. It's an odd ball Sound Card forgotten by time.

Phil, what do you use to clean up your cards there? They're all so brilliantly shiny and clean. My collection of creative cards would look so much nicer like that. (Like you, I have nearly a full set of them from SBpro through to audigy 1, int + ext).

I wish you'd come back this and do these and the gpus for just SOCKET 7...

the sound blaster live 5.1 more period correct for a k6-2-500

17:10 Sound decelerator you say. That sounds like a challenge to build a SS7 machine with that card.

Did I miss something here? I would think the DAC is the most important thing in a sound card. Which card has the best DAC for listening to music?

I can recommend the Creative CT4810 for any old W98 system for a person on a budget. Real cheap, you can find it everywhere, and it works with most DOS and newer games. Doesn't have the best sound or all the fancy sound effects line EAX or A3D but it will mortgage 99 times out of a 100 and it's dirt cheap. Too bad that the hardware guru up there in the video didn't have one of them, it's a good contender for anyone on a budget.

The Aureal Vortex 2 was like a hardware cheat back then. :D

Very informative! Thanks!

A big thankyou for this video clip. I myself had an AWE64 Gold and still have it, also I am using a live card for the last 20 yrs, I have not given up the OS too and still stuck with XP since there is no driver support. The interesting feature in this card is that you could adjust the treble & Bass seperatly , also has 2 audio outs and record any audio which is played (what you hear)in the background without any loss.I am looking for a similar card for the last 5 yrs and still unable locate with these mini feature.Do you know of any newer cards which has these features, internal or external card which supports 7 or 10?

SB Live has a joystick port. Seems like the Audigy cards don't.

Another great video Phil. How did you get all your cards so clean and shiny? They look like you lacquered the boards.

i had that Yamaha PCI card back in the day i don't remember what model it was, but i had a difficult time getting it to work most of the time.. i think it was do to drivers because when it did work it it was fine... Ended up finding a ISA Sound blaster gold AWE 32? at a swap meet..

Had a Live! and an old SB16 in my P3-500 (Tyan motherboard with ISA slots) -- one for Windows and the other for DOS. My very oldest SB16 (the long card from 1993) is still in use -- it plays nice with my P4-3GHz (a P4 with ISA slots!) that's now my DOS gaming box, while the newer SB16 would not. Sounds like crap compared to newer cards, but at least it works! Do you have the Creative driver archive for all the old cards?

I tried installing an Audigy 2 ZS on a Windows 98 machine. The installation software refused to recognize that the card was in the system, despite doing the manual driver install (which didn't work, as it required me to put in the Windows 98 disk, despite the fact that the disk drive had the driver cd in it). I kinda gave up, so I'll just slap a Sound Blaster live in it, and call it a day.

Great job! Thank you very much!

I still have my Audigy 2 ZS Platinum, haha. I should probably see if anyone wants that thing. It's the one with front 5.25" bay module and remote control.

No Terratec card in your collection? I had the SBLive and Audigy myself back in the days. First soundcard was a SB1.0 from logitech, using with dos/win.3.1x. It was hard work getting this thing working back then...

Hm ... I Remember Having an Audigy 2 ZS At least i Believe it was that one did that one com with the External Unit that had Midi I/O ,Mic Preamp ,Headphone Out ,Volume control ect (to connect to the firewire port on the card)

Hi Philip. I wahtched many of yours videos and these particularly gave a doubt. The "audigy" can works on DOS in real hardware PC and get sound on Nascar 1 or tomb Raider 1?

Where is ess1868 card? It was still around during socket 7 time and was quite popular too.

I would bet on the AWE64 ISA : good performances, good sound, perfect compatibility with dos games, good midi emulation. What else ? I had some Yamaha during my long geek life, and I always found the sound not good. I tested a YMF724 with a spectrum analyser and the response is on par with a ferric tape. Bof

Great video Phil.

All ur cards r so shiny and good looking what r u cleaning them with ??=P