Razer Barracuda AC-1

As we said with the Auzentech, we’re impressed when companies go above and beyond reference designs for products. Razer’s Barracuda AC-1 is such a product. Though it uses the same C-Media Oxygen HD chip as the X-Meridian, you wouldn’t think the two cards were related.

The AC-1 gives you a proprietary DVI-like connector that you can directly connect to the Razer’s HP-1 headset (or your standard speakers using the included dongle). And like the X-Meridian, the AC-1 features dual optical ports, but this card is definitely intended for gaming. And that’s where it gets interesting. The CMI8788 isn’t a DSP, like the X-Fi, it’s more of a super I/O chip that passes data from the PCI bus to the various components on the AC-1 at a very efficient clip.

Most of the filtering for 3D effects, including Dolby and other processor-intensive chores, is done on the computer’s CPU. In FEAR, for example, the X-Fi’s DSP gives it about a 10 percent frame-rate advantage over the other cards in analog mode. (Dolby Digital encoding adds even more overhead to the Razer card, but the X-Fi is incapable of real-time DD5.1 encoding.)

We’ve been wondering if our stance against host-based audio was outdated in the age of multicore CPUs, but a 10 percent hit is still painful—it’s like dropping the CPU down a rung or two.

Of course, the DSP doesn’t always work against the AC-1. In 3DMark03, which uses simpler audio routines, the AC-1 performs the same as or better than the X-Fi. Performance could also improve if the drivers for the AC-1 were multithreaded.

In gaming fidelity, the AC-1 fared well in our tests, with one exception. In Battlefield 2, we noticed dropouts in audio. The same happened with the X-Meridian, so we suspect it’s a problem with the chipset or its drivers that is induced by the tremendous amount of audio BF2 throws at you.

Where does that leave the AC-1? At $200, it’s pretty expensive. In fact, the AC-1 costs more than the X-Fi with its fancy schmancy (and so far useless) onboard X-RAM. It doesn’t help that the AC-1 lacks OpenAL support and sounds inferior to the Creative card in many of the games we tested.