Gamespot heeft een review gepost van de nieuwe Aureal Vortex II SQ2500, die in feite een opgelapte Vortex II is met verbeterde MIDI en lagere CPU belasting (driver kwestie):
We ran the SQ2500 through our stock 500MHz Pentium III test bed. The Ziff-Davis Audio Winbench scores were very good, indeed. The most rigorous test is the DirectSound3D streaming-audio set of tests. At 22KHz/8-bit resolution, the 2500 barely touched the CPU, generating 1.65 percent with 16 voices and 2.22 percent at 32 voices. The results at 16-bit/44KHz resolution were even more impressive: 1.81 percent with 16 voices and 2.52 percent with 32 voices. The 32-bit numbers, in particular, are a marked improvement over the rev A Vortex2 chip.MIDI has improved. The acoustic piano samples do sound a touch muffled, but the horns are clearer and the percussion is quite a bit better. (We tested MIDI using only the 64-voice hardware MIDI). MIDI isn't that big a factor in today's titles, but it's still nice to know that the Vortex2 wavetable has improved somewhat. If you do have a hankering for better samples, there's a connector for a MIDI daughtercard. There have also been complaints about the signal output strength of the analog output, but we were able to hear .WAV and game audio at quite loud volumes.
