Abit Arcadia AU10

While best known for its increasingly lauded motherboard range, Abit has other strings to its corporate bow, including speaker systems and sound cards. The Arcadia AU10 is an audio card aimed squarely at users wishing to use their PC as a DVD player with full Dolby Digital credentials.

The chipset that powers Arcadia is the ForteMedia FM801. It's a deceptively small chip, offering accelerated 3D audio features for gamers using QSound's Q3D 2.0 engine and full 5.1 audio support - there are six line outs, for front right and left, rear right and left, centre and sub-woofer output.

This is primarily of interest to home cinema enthusiasts with appropriate 5.1 amplified speaker setups, though a number of other configurations are viable. Crucially, Abit bundles InterVideo's WinDVD 2000 (version 2.2), a software DVD player that includes full Dolby Digital 5.1 decoding in software. Without this, the six-channel output would be of little use.

The physical bundle consists of the sound card itself, a short breakout cable for additional audio connections, and an infra-red sensor unit paired with a rather dinky remote control. Abit has taken steps to remove the last real drawback of computer-based DVD - the lack of control while stretched out on your sofa. The sensor connects to the PS/2 keyboard port on your PC, with a pass-through connection for your keyboard. The remote simply sends key-presses to WinDVD.

Audio connections use stereo mini-jacks. The card spine carries the main front stereo output, along with a line level stereo input and mono microphone input for recording. The breakout cable splits out to three mini-jacks: one duplicating the front output, a second carrying the rear stereo output, and a third carrying the mono centre and sub-woofer channels. Internally, the card has inputs for the analog audio stream from a CD or DVD-ROM drive, plus connections for 'Video', 'AUX' and 'TAD' (for a modem).

Installation is painless. The card was tested under Windows 98 SE with no problems whatsoever, allocating resources happily in a PC stuffed with other peripherals. WDM drivers are available for Windows 2000 users.

Sound quality is generally good, especially in conjunction with WinDVD. The Arcadia diverts all low-frequency sounds from the main four channels' output from WinDVD (front and rear) to the sub-woofer channel, producing a far better bass response than many other 5.1 sound cards.

Gaming performance is more of a mixed bag. In benchmarking, the card's performance comes close to the SoundBlaster Live!, requiring little CPU overhead running games with high audio demands. However, the QSound engine only supports EAX 1.0 (Environmental Audio eXtensions), with no sign of EAX 2.0 support in the pipeline. Additionally, the EAX reverb algorithms used by QSound sound less realistic than those provided by the SoundBlaster Live!.

On the MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) side, the FM801 chipset is extremely poor out of the box, offering only an FM (Frequency Modulation) synthesis engine that went out with the ark. Fortunately, Abit has bundled a licensed copy of Yamaha's S-YXG50 software WaveTable synthesiser. This has support for the extended MIDI specification known as XG, allowing richer tonality to be drawn from otherwise standard sounds. However, Arcadia is no musician's card by any stretch of the imagination.

Overall, Arcadia is the ideal 5.1 solution for soft DVD users. The asking price is little more than the DVD software itself, and as such is a relative bargain when twinned with the right speaker set.

Contact
Abit: 01438 228 888, www.abit.nl

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