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Review: Gainward Hollywood@Home 7.1

by Ryszard Sommefeldt on 10 January 2004, 00:00

Tags: Gainward

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Gainward Hollywood@Home 7.1

Gainward are more well known for their graphics cards. Indeed, they have the honour of producing the fastest graphics card on the planet in terms of raw numbers (at the time of writing), due to their Golden Sample GPUs and judicious application of watercooling. I didn't even know they made soundcards until they fired over an email asking if I fancied a peek at the focus of this article. So let's take a closer look at the Hollywood@Home 7.1, keeping in mind what we talked about on the first page, and see what Gainward have done.

Gainward box

Oh yeah baby, he's diggin' his eight channels of audio, using, err, stereo headphones. We're off to a blinding start. However, despite not quite understanding what he's marketing, our denim clad friend does seem chuffed and he's pointing at you the reader, to look at his box.

The box itself is about the size of a current DVD case, just a little deeper. You can't fail to spot what's inside either, "Channel 7.1", the obligatory "24/96" designation that nobody really understands or cares about, "Optical S/PDIF" to let you know you're getting optical digital connections and that pesky number eight again. Opening it up gets you the following.

Gainward box 2

What you see is what you get, one red PCB Hollywood@Home 7.1 PCI sound card, a Gainward case badge and a couple of CDs to drive it.

Gainward CDs

The first CD is drivers for the card and nothing else, save a manual. That gets you going with some recent Envy24HT-S drivers for OS support of the card.

The second CD is more interesting. InterVideo get additional software duties with the Hollywood@Home 7.1, but instead of the two channel, crippled version of WinDVD, their software DVD player, that ships with almost all hardware these days, Gainward supply you with the fully licensed multi-channel version, essential in supporting your eight channel endeavours. As well as support for the audio hardware, the version of WinDVD also supports DirectX interfaces to any installed hardware DVD decoders, such as add-in cards and the hardware assist engines on recent GPUs like Radeon and GeForceFX. While it's WinDVD 4 that ships with the card, with WinDVD 5 being available, there's no real difference between WinDVD 4 with the multi-channel support and WinDVD 5 which ships with it as a standard feature.

As part of the WinCinema bundle, you also get WinRip 2, an application that allows you to rip your audio CDs to a variety of audio formats. While it doesn't rip to any format that can encapsulate a full eight channels of sound, CDs are stereo format anyway, there'd be no benefit. The driver upmix to eight channels does the job there.

So while it's not too heavy on bundle features and there's no software other than WinDVD and WinRip, with a fully copy of WinDVD 5 costing more than the entire Hollywood@Home 7.1 product, you get decent value for money.