X-bit labs

Contemporary Integrated Sound Solutions: Storm is Coming (page 8)

Category: Multimedia

by Sergey Samarin

[ 08/25/2003 | 03:57 PM ]

Environment settings

As for the sheer number of options, the Environment tab is the most powerful one in the whole Control Panel. You can immediately check out any changes you make using the sample file. The drop-down menu lists numerous presets for you to choose. There are three tabs at the bottom of the window: Routing, Source Levels and Parameter Editor. Here, you can also create and save your own preset using the following effects: Chorus, Compressor, Distortion, Echo, Flanger, Gargle and ParamEq.

Source Levels: the tab where you can set volume levels for different sound sources

Parameter Editor tab for selected effects

The Parameter Editor is for advanced tweakers. The user receives access to hardware registers, DSP and mixer settings as well as to the memory allocated for the audio processor. Any changes are applied in real time, so you can set up the audio subsystem by ear.

Here you can select external applications for further work with the sound

The Application tab stores shortcuts to various multimedia applications to quick-launch them. You can add new shortcuts or remove unwanted ones.

Information window

The Information tab displays the version of the installed driver and Control Panel, and the DirectX version. The advanced info section informs you about the current APU workload and the number of processed voices. So, here you control the driver installation and learn what your APU is doing down in the hardware level.

As you see, the Control Panel for the nForce APU provides various settings, which only testify the hardware power of the audio processor. In the next, “Performance” section of this review, I will try to compare the work of the computer in resource-hungry applications with and without the APU involved. You want to know what difference it brings? Read on!