Excellent Card if you are on a Low Budget
Written: Nov 06 '00
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Excellent Price/Value Combination
Cons: No longer support by S3, need to go to NVidia to get Win 2K drivers
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| matwood's Full Review: S3 Diamond Viper Ultra 770 |
Before the release of the DDR, Voodoo 5500, etc., I bought these when they were considered state of the art. However, with the advent of gaming, these cards, while not state of the art, are still excellent performers.
I have 3 of these cards installed, and with a price of under $100, where lese can you get an AGP 4x card with 32 Megs of RAM that is highly supported by most games?
Installation of this card is a breeze, and the software installation is also geared towards beginning computer people.
To get the best performance, make sure you have the latest BIOS as well as the latest drivers.
The graphics are excellent - I used this card to play Diablo II, and the graphics look identical as when run on a newer, more expensive card! So why spend the extra cash if you are on a budget and don't need to do complex rendering?
Here are my gripes:
On one system, when I turn it on, sometimes the card does not initialize properly, causing a needed push to the reset button. However, this could be due to the dual cpu Soyo motherboard I am using, which only supports AGP 2X.
There is no real support anymore from S3 for Windows ME or Windows 2000. Thank goodness nvida still has a site that has Windows 2000 and Windows ME drivers.
Summary:
1) Excellent card, great speed and graphics. Text is crisp and clear
when word processing.
2) Excellent price
3) Stable, except when first turning on computer could have a problem,
but then hit reset button!
4) Great Price
CONS:
1) Card no longer supported by S3 (too bad Diamond merged with them)
2) Drivers not current, need to go to NVidia site to get them
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 99
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Epinions.com ID:
matwood
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Member: Michelle Atwood
Reviews written: 21
Trusted by: 3 members
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