Audiotrak Maya 7.1 soundcard $20 shipped

I think it uses the VIA Envy24HT-S or Envy24PT. You can tell by downloading the drivers and inspecting the inf file.

Many of those cards have excellent audio quality with good DACs, but the cards have very poor gaming performance. All effects are host based (including DS3D), and the cards don't have any hardware buffers.
 
I R n00b, but that all means that the card is good for all-non gaming uses? HTPC? Thanks!
 
Pete84 said:
I R n00b, but that all means that the card is good for all-non gaming uses? HTPC? Thanks!
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yes, sorta

At this pricepoint its either this or the chaintech AV710

Don't know which is better but the the AV710's user base is far larger (lots of good support)

I posted the maya 7.1 mostly for the curious to try out.
 
The Via Envy has such a good DSP that even without hardware acceleration for games, You arnt losing much. I disabled sound and gained 1-3fps average in all games while using the Chaintech AV710
 
pxc said:
I think it uses the VIA Envy24HT-S or Envy24PT. You can tell by downloading the drivers and inspecting the inf file.
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Inspected the .inf file as you suggested but couldn't spot anything definitive. There is a lot of junk in there so i probably didn't look hard enough.

PsychoZX said:
No it uses a cmedia chip not a Via. The higher end Prodigy uses a via Envy.
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Would love to see some linkage, I've googled it a few times but haven't researched in depth (TIA). I suspect you are right, the maya 7.1 was released awhile ago, and "probably" before the envy chipset went into production.

That being said i'd take a cmedia-based Audiotrak over any other company's version, except maybe the X-Mystique, but that goes for $100.
 
I just looked it up and it's not a C-Media chip either. :p

It uses VIA SIX-TRAC (6 ch VT1616) and SigmaTel (2 ch 9721) AC'97 chips for 7.1 output. The bigger QPFP chip is a Hint PCI to PCI bridge (vendor ID 3388 in the drivers) to interface the 2 separate AC'97 chips.

I didn't realize this card is almost 4 years old. Good to see Audiotrak is still supporting it somewhat (latest drivers are only about 1 year old).
 
pxc said:
I just looked it up and it's not a C-Media chip either. :p

It uses VIA SIX-TRAC (6 ch VT1616) and SigmaTel (2 ch 9721) AC'97 chips for 7.1 output. The bigger QPFP chip is a Hint PCI to PCI bridge (vendor ID 3388 in the drivers) to interface the 2 separate AC'97 chips.

I didn't realize this card is almost 4 years old. Good to see Audiotrak is still supporting it somewhat (latest drivers are only about 1 year old).
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dude thats some killer investigative work, where did you find that info?

correct me if i'm wrong but didn't some mobo's come with that audio chip onboard? A seperate pci card would sound even nicer.

I wonder if those are quality dacs (the word ac97 kinda scares me but sigmaTel sounds a little better :D ).

Asio2 support and other stuff is included in that latest driver.
 
SJetski71 said:
correct me if i'm wrong but didn't some mobo's come with that audio chip onboard? A seperate pci card would sound even nicer.
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It was an awesome card at the time it was new. It has a 90dbA S/N ratio, about 5-7x better than the same chips when installed on a motherboard.

The investigation involved looking at a high res picture of the card, inspecting the inf file and looking up the vendor ID from the inf in the PCI-SIG database. Easy. ;)
 
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