Did a fair tonne of reading on forums, seems SoundMAX is a sound 'chip' versus having the ability to hardware process sound. So it appears all it does is use your CPU to do all your sound while it just having onboard instructions on how to process it.

Apparently some people have gotten it to work with extreme tweaking but its extremely poor quality.

I am looking at just getting an Audigy Card for when my laptop is docked.