I obtained the card from my local CompUSA and and brought it home for testing. After unpackaging it, the first thing you notice about the actual card are the 6 outlet jacks on the back of the card for "front out," "surround out", "center/LFE," "headphones/7&8", "mic in." and "line in." That is 3 more jacks than my old Aureal 8820-based PCI sound card had.

Installation of the card on OS/2 was relatively simple. After placing it in an open PCI slot, the system powered up properly and recognized the new card without problems. The boot to OS/2 proceeded normally. The Crystal OS/2 v3.11 drivers obtained from Hobbes (file "CWOS2311.ZIP") installed easily using the standard "MINSTALL" multimedia driver installer and the config.sys file was automatically updated with the necessary lines for the drivers. After a reboot, the OS/2 system sounds worked properly and the sound quality seemed pretty good. There were no IRQ or resource problems although the address for another PCI card had changed slightly due to the addition of the Fortissimo III. One small negative was that the Crystal audio devices do not appear in the OS/2 "Hardware Manager" as most other OS/2 PCI sound device drivers do. They don't even show up with the command-prompt 'RMVIEW" utility. Fortunately, this is not necessary but it would be helpful to users if they appeared. Crystal OS/2 drivers are notable for their support of sound in Win-OS2 and DOS and the CS4624 drivers are no exception. The DOS sound worked properly for the "Red Baron" DOS game using the 'Adlib Music Synthesizer' selection and the Win-OS2 'ta-da' sounds popped out at the right times.

Next, I tried playing some MP3 files with WarpAmp. WarpAmp showed the Crystal PCI sound device listed in its 'settings' menu and began playing MP3s on command. The sound quality was very good and sounded as good, or better, as my old Aureal 8820-based sound card. High frequencies were particularly clear and sharp. Next, I tried performance with RealPlayer 8 running under Odin (the 6 December 2002 Odin release) and clicked on some 'video' links on the BBC website. These played okay and the sound and video were in synch but the sound quality was slightly gravelly, although easily understandable. Clicking on the RealPlayer 8 'preferences' (under the 'View' menu) and then selecting the 'performance' and 'sound card compatibility' tabs brought up a radio buttom option for 'Disable Custom Sampling Rates'. Clicking on this button, then saving and restarting, improved the sound quality to a very acceptable performance that was comparable to the Aureal card.

The .MID midi files would play on the Fortissimo III with the OS/2 driver, although the mixing of the sound components was not as good as the Aureal card. Depending on your file, you might hear more of the glockenspiel than you really wanted to hear and less of another sound. The .MID files provided with the base OS/2 install generally played okay.

Digital sound recording using the OS/2 'Digital Sound' application worked very well. Sound quality was good and all of the sound recording options were available and seemed to work properly.

The Fortissimo III supports 8 speaker channels but the OS/2 drivers provide output for only 4 speaker channels via the 'Front Out' and the '7&8' jacks. Volume control works for all 4 channels. There is also a digital optical output S/PDIF jack that was not tested.

The most recent OS/2 drivers for the CS 4624 chipset on the Cirrus website are only v3.06. Downloading and testing these older drivers found several serious problems that have been apparently fixed with the v3.11 drivers on Hobbes. The v3.06 drivers had an initialization problem where the playback tempo would occasionally speed up for mp3 songs in a playlist. Sound in Realplayer 8 would not work with these drivers and would come through in garbled little soundbites rather than a smooth play as it did with the newer v3.11 drivers. There were also v3.08 drivers on Hobbes that would not load for the Fortissimo III. If you get the Fortissimo III card, be sure you use the v3.11 drivers.

The Fortissimo III with the v3.11 OS/2 drivers provides a good all-around sound option for OS/2 that I would recommend. It manages to do everything sound-related in OS/2 very competently including DOS, Win-OS2, and wave sound.