We ran the Entertainer through a variety of CPU usage tests, to get an idea of how much processor time you can expect this card to eat up given its lack of a hardware 3D audio solution. For comparison purposes, we also included scores from a Creative Audigy, a very popular sound card that has a huge installed base.

PCStats Test System Specs:

processor: amd athlonxp 3000+ @ 2.17ghz motherboards: aopen ak79-d 400 max videocard: msi geforce fx5600 / 128mb memory: 2x 256mb corsair twinx3200ll hard drive: 40gb western digital special ed. cdrom: nec 52x cd-rom powersupply: vantec 470w stealth psu software setup windowsxp build 2600 intel inf 5.00.1012 catalyst 3.7 workstation benchmarks 3dmark03 rightmark x2: the threat

Futuremark 3DMark03	Source: FutureMark

This new accurate diagnostic tool, designed for DirectX9.0, provides you with all the information you need to make informed hardware assessments. Havok Total real-time physics library from Havok - these routines are used to accurately model the movements of objects due to forces, etc. FMOD sound library from Firelight Technologies - these are used for the various sound effects and routines used in the tests. Graphics adapter analysis software from Powerstrip of Entech Taiwan - this is used to correctly determine the speeds of the graphics processing and video memory chips, plus supply additional hardware information. Higher 3DMark03 scores denote better performance.

3DMark03 Benchmark Results
No Sound Test	FPS	Ranking
Creative Audigy	31.0
Mad Dog Multimedia Entertainer 7.1	31.0
24 Sounds Test	FPS	Ranking
Creative Audigy	26.2
Mad Dog Multimedia Entertainer 7.1	23.2

Futuremark's hugely popular gaming benchmark can test the effect of 3D audio on game performance by running the same benchmark three times; once with no sound, once with 24 voices and once with 60. The Entertainer is capable of rendering 33 different voices (to the Audigy's 30) so neither card could complete the third part of this test. It seems that the Entertainer's lack of 3D sound support in hardware slows it down slightly here.

Rightmark	Source: Rightmark

Rightmark 3D sound CPU utilization test
This benchmark tests the processor usage percentage of a soundcard when presented with various 3D audio tasks. The 'buffers' represent individual sound streams.

The Entertainer shows slightly higher CPU usage numbers than the Audigy in this set of tests, especially when using EAX. As the Audigy has hardware 3D support built in and is a product of the company that created EAX, while the Entertainer is using third-party drivers to emulate it, this is not really surprising.