Diamond’s Monster Sound MX300 has been widely hailed as the PCI sound card of choice for the discerning gamer, with support for all the popular PC surround sound standards

The MX300, like the MX200, has a black rear panel, with gold plated connectors. The gold connectors won’t do anything for your sound – gold terminals are less prone to corrosion, but only if you use gold-plated PLUGS in your gold sockets. But the oh-so-cool black panel has white labelling on it, which makes the Monster Sound cards possibly the first on which the connectors are easily identified.

The MX300 is based on Aureal’s Vortex 2 chipset, which gives it hardware support for both the A3D and A3D 2.0 surround sound Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). It also supports Microsoft’s DirectSound, DirectSound 3D and with a future driver version will also support DirectSound EAX (Environmental Audio eXtensions). So, in English, there are few surround-sound-supporting games with which the MX300 will not work perfectly. When the EAX-compatible drivers come out, it’ll have all bases covered, unless games start using CRL’s upcoming Sensaura system – great, another standard, just what we need.