• Intel Pentium-3 600 & Celeron 400 processors -- normal clockspeed
• Abit BX6 motherboard rev 2.01
• 128 Megabytes Crucial PC133 ram
• IBM UDMA 33 10.1 gig hard drive
• ATI Rage Fury 32 meg video w TV OUT - ATI 6263 drivers
• Pioneer 103s 6x DVD drive w DMA enabled
• 17 inch Sony 200ES Trinitron monitor
• Diamond MX300 Vortex-2 Soundcard. Aureal 2040 Reference Drivers.
• Klipsch Promedia v.2-400 speakers
• Plextor 8x20 CD writer w Adaptec 2930c SCSI card
• Win98SE
• MS DirectX 8
• TV OUT tested using S-VIDEO output to a Sony 35KVS66 Trinitron

The LIVE! Value soundcard made an unexpected exit. (Due to the fact it quit working!) PC safety tip: Use the Screws for your cards! They prevent the card from coming loose and shorting itself out while the system is powered. Important safety tip! InMatrix is here to help!

In the end, the Vortex-2 card performed similarly to the LIVE in tests. SP/DIF support for SB LIVE is conspicuously ABSENT from SoftDVD so far (for external amp users). Yamaha, Vortex-2 and others are supported. The rest of the system is unchanged from recent reviews.

Note:
MGI found issues with the Adaptec SCSI card in the test system. It caused serious video problems when Hardware Acceleration was not enabled. When the retail release of SoftDVD v6 is available, this should be fully corrected. However, other players (VaroDVD comes to mind) exhibited identical behavior, and it may not in fact be a player issue as we believed in previous reviews, but a problem with Windows ability to integrate decoding acceleration when a SCSI card is present unless the software routines are written perfectly to avoid conflicts.