ExtremeTech have thrown up their review of Creative's Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS in a PCMCIA format for notebooks!
The LAN party. It's our generation's bowling/poker/movie night all rolled up in one. Hauling gear to a LAN party can be a real drag (literally), and some gamers have taken to bringing high-end laptops instead. And why not? With GPUs like ATI's Mobility Radeon 9800 available now and nVidia's competitive equivalent coming soon, why wouldn't you want to put all your LAN party gear into a single small backpack? Well, for all the CPU and 3D goodness that has made its way into the mobile set, most mobile audio solutions have hardly evolved at all.
It isn't that decent solutions aren't available?it's more a function of laptop makers almost always doing minimal audio implementations. To wit, there hasn't been a single laptop audio solution on the market with hardware buffers and hardware-accelerated support for DirectSound3D processing effects. But Creative recently changed all that with its new Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS Notebook. This Cardbus-based mobile audio solution sports the very same E-Mu 10K2 audio processor that powers its desktop cousin. It also carries more logos than the back of a well-traveled Winnebago (EAX 4.0, DVD-Audio, Dolby Digital, DTS, THX, ASIO 2.0).
Creative Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS Notebook
The LAN party. It's our generation's bowling/poker/movie night all rolled up in one. Hauling gear to a LAN party can be a real drag (literally), and some gamers have taken to bringing high-end laptops instead. And why not? With GPUs like ATI's Mobility Radeon 9800 available now and nVidia's competitive equivalent coming soon, why wouldn't you want to put all your LAN party gear into a single small backpack? Well, for all the CPU and 3D goodness that has made its way into the mobile set, most mobile audio solutions have hardly evolved at all.
It isn't that decent solutions aren't available?it's more a function of laptop makers almost always doing minimal audio implementations. To wit, there hasn't been a single laptop audio solution on the market with hardware buffers and hardware-accelerated support for DirectSound3D processing effects. But Creative recently changed all that with its new Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS Notebook. This Cardbus-based mobile audio solution sports the very same E-Mu 10K2 audio processor that powers its desktop cousin. It also carries more logos than the back of a well-traveled Winnebago (EAX 4.0, DVD-Audio, Dolby Digital, DTS, THX, ASIO 2.0).
Creative Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS Notebook
