Category: Sound Cards
Manufacturer: Razer
Product: Barracuda Barracuda™ AC-1 Gaming Audio Card
Price: $199.99

Razer is a company founded on the premise of creating devices specifically catered to gamers. Instead of offering low tier as well as high end products, they stick with the high-end gaming demographic. They were founded in 1998 and quickly made a name for themselves by developing mice built for gamers, at a premium price tag. In 2000, though, this disappeared for four years due to the dot com bust. Since then, they’ve released four new mice, and are currently venturing into new avenues of development. This review takes a look at their first shot at the emerging gaming sound card market, the Barracuda AC-1 sound card. It would seem that for their sound devices, they’ve switched gears from naming their products after snakes to naming them after fish. This ought to be a convenient way of figuring out what’s what in their lineup. The barracuda is unique compared to other audio devices because it has a sister headset specifically developed to be used with it. We’ve reviewed this headset in the past, so we won’t get into the ins and outs of it any more than we have to, though it’s impossible to completely ignore it when reviewing its twin product. The Barracuda AC-1 came in attractive packaging with a good manual, connection pictures, and an installation CD. The outputs for the Barracuda AC-1 consist of a proprietary connector that shares its design with the typical DVI interface, which Razer dubs the HD Dedicated Audio Interface (HD-DAI), and an optical input/output. Supposing you don’t have the HP-1 headset, the Barracuda comes with a dongle cable that splits the HD-DAI connector into analogue 7.1 connections and microphone/line-in inputs. This solution is kind of ugly, but it’s not something we’re going to really knock off points for Razer on. When Razer designed the card, they gave it a giant, bulky heat sink with a large Razer Barracuda logo on it. We don’t understand the obsession with making the cards themselves look stylish, when they’re never seen in any system that has more than 2 cards. In this case, it turned out to be more of an annoyance than anything because it was a real bi*** to install. With the heat sink, it took up about the absolute maximum space that one PCI slot is allowed to use under the PCI specification. Once we finally got the thing in, we installed the software. The software features its own control interface like most high end sound cards to these days, opting to override the woefully under featured standard windows interface. It allows you to select outputs for whatever setup you have, from an HD-DAI connected headset (which currently can only be the HP-1), normal headphones, 2.1, 5.1, and 7.1 surround sound setups. Additionally, it allows you to easily set the output quality, from optical DTS digital output all the way down to 44 KHz analogue. One of the neatest features is a 3D sound tester that simulates a helicopter noise floating around you so that you can gauge the 3D performance of the card. It came in quite useful in our tests.