Install?:

Quick install guide

Installed

Internal ports

Ok. If you think I’m going to explain how to do the physical install for the card, you’re nuts! Here is my advice, if you don’t know how to install a PCI card, you probably aren’t the person who is going to buy this to begin with. If you've installed one before, there no surprises waiting for you.

On the driver side of things, also no surprises. I booted the system with the card installed, hit cancel when windows popped up asking for drivers. Then just ran the install on the Razer Driver CD, and rebooted the system after following the directions.

Testing:

For thorough testing, I did three separate installs of the AC-1. The first, I did an install that might be the most common situation, though not the smartest. I simply removed my previous sound card, a Creative Sound Blaster Audigy 2, plugged in the the Razer AC-1, and installed the drivers for the Razer.

I did not un-install any of Creative's drivers, change any audio settings or otherwise muck with things. This is NOT the recommended way to do an install of this hardware, however it is something that will happen very often in the real world.

The 2nd test, I un-installed all my previous (creative) software and drivers, prior to installing the AC-1. This is how you should upgrade your system, if you aren't starting from scratch.

The 3rd install, was a clean install of windows, with the AC-1 physically installed already. Generally, if you are having any issues with something, this is the best way to clear them up.

HP-1 + AC-1

7.1 adapter

Optical in/out + HD-DAI

For all 3 tests, I used the Barracuda HP-1 headphones, connected via the HD-DAI connector, my Zalman 5.1 surround sound headphones with the supplied adapter cable. For speakers, Logitech Z5500's, using both the Optical out, as well as the HD-DAI via said adapter cable.

My game selections for testing included the standard classics, Counter-Strike:Source, UT2004, Battlefield 2 / 2142. In addition, I recently picked up Splinter Cell:Double agent.

If you read my two Copy protection articles, you might remember me talking about never buying another Ubisoft game until they removed StarForce protection from their games? Well if you hadn't read a few months ago, they caved to the massive pressure everyone was placing on them, and dropped their contracts with StarForce (Yippy!). It's a shame Double Agent was made by the Shanghai office, but this is the wrong place to get into that.

Music playback:

I said the same thing in my review of the Barracuda HP-1, Razer might be building these for games and gamers, but you can not release a sound card and forget about quality music playback. Though I wonder if it's even possible to make a card that only sounds good in games in the first place.

To this end, I would like to revisit one of my complaints against the Barracuda HP-1, I mentioned that it suffered from a distinct lack of bass when compared to my Zalman 5.1 headphones.

By default, it is virtual impossible to get any amount of bass to come through the headphones, even when dropping the levels of everything else and raising the “bass” volume on the HP-1's controller. However with the AC-1's drivers, you can adjust which frequency's  get sent to the sub woofers (for both headphones and regular speakers) Setting this to a higher level drastically increases the amount of bass to the headphones. My standard “Toccata” test came through with flying colors after the changes. Finding and configuring all these settings does take a while though. It's hard to know exactly what you can click on in the configuration window, and there are a lot of options to choose from.

There is a feature of the headphones that is designed to “Vibrate” to low frequency, and when this works (there is a small problem I will get to later) it does give the “feeling” of deep bass going through your skull, but no sound. This is the weirdest feeling the world I swear, but once you get used to it, it really adds something to both music and games. I find the vibration comes on my more readily if you select “7.1 Speakers” instead of the HD-DAI connector using the drivers (keeping it physically connected to the HD-DAI the whole time).