Hercules Gamesurround Fortissimo III Sound Card

Product: Fortissimo III
Manufacturer: Hercules
Written by: Brann Mitchell
Date: November 2002
 

Hey, hold on a second ..

“Hey, how much does this thing cost?”
“It's $35 bucks.”
“Wait, how much?”
“Thirty-five dollars, man.”
“Okay.”

Honestly, I only talk to myself when the medication starts to wear off.  As the resident cheap-o at guru3d, the Fortissimo 3 (the FF3) is a hard bargain to beat.  It is tough to get excited about a sound card these days, since motherboard manufacturers simply give them away for free.  Some motherboards even have tubes. Hercules’ FF3 definitely has got something to get excited about: 8 channels of sound.  It's got to be some record or something.  It was also impervious to crashes.  Are you excited yet?

Click on images for high-resolution photo's - Fortissimo III

I don’t want to go into to much detail, mostly because, dammit Jim, I’m a gamer, not an engineer.  It is worth pointing out that the Crystal CS4624 is a cheap version of the 4622 DSP.  The 4622 DSP provides more computing power (300MIPS vs. 255MIPS) and functionality (Dolby AC3 decoding in hardware).  There was a little stink around the web about how the CS4624 is considered a 6-channel solution.  But we’re talking about DSPs here, so I’m not too surprised that Hercules got 8-channels since DSPs are highly programmable.

On the upside, Crystal DACs are used by a number of high-end stereo equipment manufacturers, from folks like Cambridge Audio (D500 CD player) and the AudioNote DAC-One.  It’s a safe bet they use Crystal’s DACs because they tend to sound good.

So in capability, don’t expect more than your standard AC ’97 spec, just with eight channels of pretty good sound.

You don’t get much of a set of bundled software with the FF3, either.  You get Cyberlink’s PowerDVD EX, ACID XPress, Windows Media Player (Ha… okay, I won’t laugh), Hercules MediaStation II, and lastly the ubiquitous Yamaha XG software synthesizer.