Yes, I agree with you Fury about Soundstorm, Maybe it'll be on Nforce 5. But really, it was a luck piece of hardware - the chip was originally developed for the xbox and then released as part of the nforce1 chipset. The cost of licensing the DICE technology - Later called Dolby Digital Live - was too high for nvidia. That feature alone made that chip awesome, being able to encode into a AC3 stream from any source if you wanted (or switch between AC3 and PCM, nice choice. Try doing that with an Audigy 2!
Basically it made the nforce2 boards, when paired with a barton cored athlon xp and a high end graphics card, a little too good - still solid gaming machines and media centers today. No onboard sound chip since then has been as good. And that was 4 years ago !
Unfortunately, they didn't make the chips for the 64 bit athlons, which also introduced the other important upgrade over the athlon xp - integrated memory controller. What a shame. Well, hopefully, we see something surpasing soundstorm on boards very soon. that would give creative a run for their money, because they've basically been overcharging customers for the very boring technology that started with the SB Live and continuted through 4 iterations of the Audigy series ever since. The only choice has really been to shell out even more money for a boutique "pro-sumer" sound card if you were on a 64 bit system and wanted that soundstorm feature.
