Diamond was quickly working with Aureal and their new Vortex2 and the result was the Diamond Monster MX300 offering a lengthy line-up of impressive features. Not only does the MX300 give you great A3D surround sound, you also get built-in software support for Dolby Digital for DVD movies and games, MIDI, and MP3 utilities. If you are fortunate enough to already own the MX200 card you can remove the MIDI daughtercard and install it on your MX300. It will also accept the Roland SCD-15 and DBXG50 MIDI cards as well. Not many games are using MIDI anymore, so this probably isn't too important unless you are an aspiring musician or just like to play around with MIDI music.
Additional software is also available like a multimedia player, mixing board, etc.
The entire install took about 3 minutes and a single reboot. SoftDVD is included so you can decode those Dolby Digital DVD titles and MusicMatch MP3 tools is also packed in so you can convert your CD's to MP3 files. I started loading up all of the A3D games I could find and every one of them sounded incredible. The sounds were rich and all 4 speakers were being individually accessed to provide some of the most realistic 3D surround I have yet to hear on a computer. Half-Life is truly the showcase title for 3D sound using A3D 2.0 and the MX300, with sounds so realistic you can stand and spin your character around in circles and make yourself nauseous from the panning sounds and speech.