Performance
I don't want to use benchmarks for sound. They are typically very outdated, and sound cards these days don't eat up much system resources anyway. Thusly, you'll never notice any degradation in frame-rate from any game. Period. The first 'application' I used was Return to Castle Wolfenstien. A most excellent game, especially the multiplayer. The very first thing to notice is that the sound would lag behind the action by about a half second. This lag, happily, is abated by the latest drivers available (v.5038) at canyon3d2.com. So make sure you apply the patch the thing before doing anything game related.

Counterstrike, the old standby, was just fine, with EAX and normal sound. I still got my butt handed to me (with a flash-bang, no less), and enjoyed every frustrating second of it. I have to realize that computers are so fast these days that even if the Hurricane ate up 20% of the frame rate, C-Strike would still play like buttah.

After some Rune action, I installed the PowerDVD 3.0 that came bundled in the box. I like PowerDVD, any version from 2.55 to 3.0. There supposedly is a 4.0 or XP Something-er-other, but it's basically the same. What can I say, all movies that supported it, supported the 4-channel sound. You may also want to check out DVD genie to switch regions without region locks on your DVD drive. I started with Rushmore, a slightly demented lolita-in-reverse kind of movie, but it's got a happy ending. No complaints except that because of the volume issue stated below, some dialog was obscured or unintelligible. After that was Akira, one of my favorite anime, and a good story in its own right. There were no problems with the exception of the lack of a babe to watch it with. Reviewing is lonely business!