Diamond Viper V770 Ultra
The first product to be given away on this site. This is one prize sure to make a person very happy. Now, lets review the specs.
Package
It came in a box. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . it was a rectangle box. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . O.K. , O.K. , just kidding, although it did come in a rectangle box, I'm just poking a little fun. Diamond has by far had some of the most attractive packaging for their products. Let's face it, I'm not going to use the box, nor even keep the box. and If I buy ANY computer related product based on the graphics ON the box. . . I'd be in trouble.
The Specifications
Controller:
Bus Type:
Memory:
Integrated RAMDAC
Horizontal Sync:
Vertical Refresh:
Monitors Supported:
Video Playback:
3D Features:
Connectors:
Drivers
Getting Started
First thing you notice when you pull the board out of the box is the Size ( pretty darn small for a 32meg board ) and that it's not just a reference board design from nVidia. This can mean great things or horrible. . . . . So lets install it and find out.
Installing the board was fairly simple, I had previously had my VooDoo3-3000 in my main box, and tracking down all my 3dfx drivers and uninstalling them to ensure no conflicts was somewhat time consuming. . . I had heard a few "left over driver" compatibility stories and figured I'd avoid the whole mess by pulling all the old drivers laying around in my machine.
Once I fired up my test rig, a Dual Celeron 433's @ 600mhz 128 PC133 on a BP6, and the first thing I noticed was how hot my card was running. I took a peek and noticed the fan on it was DOA. Well, as hard as it is to get hardware in Alaska, I'm not about to send it back over a crapped out fan. I just happened to get the 1 in 10,000 fan that was gonna die on initial testing. Big deal. . grabbed a heatsink off an old TNT and a fan from a Socket370 heatsink and we're off to the testing.
Can you say TURBO BOOST
Thought that it was pretty cool of Diamond to have a boost gauge built into the InControl video utility that comes with the drivers.
This is one of those rare times when I did install the normally RETARDED utilities that come with most videocards. I know it's not to politically correct to say that a control panel for a product is retarded. . . .but whens the last time you used yours for ANYTHING besides screen resolution or color depth?? And usually the more elaborate the set up, the more likely there will be a future conflict with another utility/control panel or video drivers.
Diamond is not usually known for half baked drivers, few and far between updates, but not half baked. This InControl Tools99 is one of the first utilities I have liked. It has 5 different settings for the ammount of "BOOST" you want. I was able to take my card all the way up to 175/183 clock/memory, easily and leave it there. Since the card came with a stock 150/183 level, I figured there was a little room to play, but it was pretty simple to lock this baby at the highest setting and then leave it there. No artifacts or visual anomalies as you might expect from OC'ing your board. The InControl Tools99 also gives you the ability to adjust certain settings like enable/disable features like V-sync, Single Pass Multi-texturing, the fog table, anti-aliasing, and MIP mapping. All of those features can be independently set for certain games.
Performance
I can almost hear you saying now, " all thats cool, but hows it perform?". Well let's get to it. The best game related benchmark known to man has been Quake. Whether it was the early days of Quake1 up until now with Q3Arena. . . . id Software has known how to bring a perfectly good graphics system to it's knees. So it seems only fitting that we use todays cutting edge games to test todays cutting edge hardware. Here's the graphs:
What we learn from these benchmarks is that resolution as compared the color depth is more of a factor on framerate. I cannot count the ammount of times people were afraid of the "hit" that 32bit color would do to their FPS, when in fact the jump in resolution, particularly the jump from 800 x 600 to 1024 x 768, was athe biggest factor in frame loss. Alot of times people dont realize these numbers show an AVERAGE frames per second, meaning their frames per second can be as high as 72fps in some areas of a map while diving to 15fps in others.
High Speed vs High Quality
I was damn close to not even posting a High Speed section of benchmarks. . . . . because lets face it, NO ONE wants to spend 200+ dollars on the "latest and greatest" hardware, and then have to turn ANYTHING ( except your speakers :^) down. Am I right??? The Viper V770 Ultra handled everything that could be thrown at it when it came to games. So how well did the synthetic benchmarks do??
2D performance
Business applications hit their respective ceilings back at 200mhx MMX with 64megs SDRAM on a 4meg Matrox Mystique. So how well would 300mhz RAMDAC and a 200Hz refresh handle the same applications??? Please don't make me slap you.
Value
I was extremely happy with the purchase of this card. You'll notice I said WAS happy. The only downside to this card was IN fact, not even a problem with the card itself. . . . but with the computer industry.
I snagged this $249.00 wonder for a STEAL (especially in Alaska) of $200.00, got it home RIPPED open the package, installed it, marveled at it's perfomance. . . . . Played Q3Arena till damn near dawn. Then the fateful moment that I decided to log on and check my e-mail and surf a little. . . nVidia announced the GeForce256. WTF. A sad moment in an otherwise fantastic buying experience.
Rating
Since we are going on a 100 point system here, I'd have to STRONGLY recommend this board simply because of the quality and care that went into manufacturing it. . . Diamond puts out a strong product. . . and the fact that as of todays date, you can pic these up at such a low price now, it's ridiculous.
RATING: 87