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Product: Turtle Beach Montego II Quadzilla
Company: Turtle Beach
Estimated Street Price: $130
Website: http://www.tbeach.com 
Review By: Matt Klosterman

About a year ago I reviewed Turtle Beach’s excellent Montego A3DXstream PCI sound card, which was based on Aureal’s Vortex chipset. Since then Aureal has come out with the follow up to the Vortex, the Vortex 2, and Turtle Beach has again put it to use in an excellent product.

Montego II Quadzilla Features:

Four speaker output support
A3D 2.0 Support
S/PDIF digital output support
Up to 48 KHz sample rates.
Greater than 97 dB signal to noise ratio
10 band hardware equalizer
320 Voice PCI wavetable synthesis

Upon opening the Quadzilla’s box, the first thing I noticed was how remarkablty similar it looks to the Montego A3DXStream. Without looking closely you could very easily mistake one for the other. A new addition that is included with the Quadzilla is a breakout board, which takes up an additional slot in your case, and provides rear speaker and S/PDIF output connections.

Installation was mostly the standard fare with no real problems. Just plug it in and install the drivers. However, if you use the break out board you’ll have to perform the additional step of connecting it to the Quadzilla and attaching it to a free slot on your case.

The Quadzilla comes bundled with Star Wars: X-Wing Alliance and Voyetra’s Audio Station 32.

In general the Quadzilla is an excellent well-rounded card that comes with quite a few nice features has a fairly reasonable pricetag. And although it is becoming almost a moot point anymore, the Quadzilla has excellent DOS support just like the Montego A3DXStream did.

The Good

A3D 2.0 Support 
S/PDIF digital output
Excellent Drivers
Nice software bundle

The Bad

Breakout board takes up a second slot in your computer

Scores

Installation 90%
Manual 91%
Drivers 92%
Price 89%
Quality 88%
Overall   90%

 

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