Introduction

With the release of CreateIt's AWEMEGA 1024 multimedia card, Thiamond has been pushed off the King of the Hill position. But...you didn't think they'd take that lying down did you? Thiamond has come up with a new card to compete with the AWEMEGA 1024, and that's the Thiamond ZK400. You can't find it in stores yet, but before you think about buying one, read our preview to see what we think...

Specifications

- Powered by the ZK400 DSP with a separate RISC coprocessor for real time 3D sounds
- Supports PCI, ISA standards
- Up to 256 simultaneous hardware sound streams, and another 1024 more supported in software
- Fully upgradable DSP for more powerful features in the future
- Remote sound processing support
- Hardware accelerated Phong shaded sound textures(higher quality than Gourard Shaded sound textures)

Compatibility

The ZK400 supports all major standards, such as IndirectSound, Oreo3D(O3D) and its own proprietary Z4D standard. Of course, performance on this card is the best when Z4D is used, but so far industry support has been lacking.

Connection

As you can see from the above image, this sound card has 2 connectors on the right and another long one on the left. The 2 connectors on the right are actually multi-purpose connectors, and can be configured to be either line in, line out, phone line or ethernet. The latter 2 are for remote sound processing support, while the former 2 are used for local sound processing. As you probably can guess, only remote or local sound processing can be done at any one time, making this card effectively only half-dohplex. A separate daughterboard with additional connectors is planned by Thiamond to make it full-dohplex, but this card is still quite far off into the future.

The left connector is actually a digital port, similar to the AWEMEGA 1024's digital jack, but Thiamond claims that their digital port actually sounds better, because it has more pins than the AWEMEGA 1024. In our tests of this early evaluation version, we noticed no discernable differences between the 2. But that's probably because we're using the 10W speakers that came with the AWEMEGA 1024. Thiamond plans to bundle the ZK400 with a 12W set of speakers, which should sound better.

Conclusion

All in all, the new ZK400 from Thiamond should provide some healthy competition to the AWEMEGA 1024, but since CreateIt beat Thiamond to the market, we're not sure if buyers are willing to wait for the ZK400, nor are we sure if we even recommend that...

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