PowerColor is a relatively new
company in computer hardware manufacturing; you might not have even heard of them before
considering they just started up in September of 1997. The fact that they started up
in 1997 does not really mean anything when you look at their management and R&D teams
who have an average of eight years experience specializing in the design and
manufacturing of a wide range of high performance graphics, video, audio cards, mainboard
and multimedia products. So the people over at PowerColor definitely
have the
expertise to produce some great products, and ever since their 1997 startup, they have
done just so.
The first product which gave PowerColor a spot on the map was the
evilQUEEN banshee card. We have done a review of this card, which you can check out
right here.
Powercolor didn't leave any features out from this board, they included top quality
SGRAM as well as a cooling fan to help keep the banshee running stably. We were
impressed by this product from a company which we had never heard of before.
Now, after several months, PowerColor has started deploying its
GameBoard series of motherboards This series is based on Intel's 82440BX AGPset and
have a variety of 2D/3D video accelerators built-in as well as a Yamaha XG 724/740 PCI
audio chip. There are four motherboard in this series, the DREAMRICH, DREAMCODE, DREAMSAGA
and DREAMPOP. The DREAMRICH has an integrated Banshee with 16 MB SGRAM, the
DREAMCODE has an integrated Riva TNT and 16MB SDRAM, the DREAMSAGA has an integrated
Voodoo3 and 16MB SGRAM and the DREAMPOP has an integrated S3 Savage4 and 16MB SGRAM.
The DREAMSAGA and DREAMPOP are not yet available because the Voodoo3's and Savage4's have
not yet been released. In this review we will be investigating and evaluating the
DREAMCODE motherboard with the integrated TNT.
PowerColor has chosen not to skimp out on components. When
most of us think of integrated motherboards, we usually think of some cheap 2MB 2D video
chip and a generic 16-bit sound chip. PowerColor knows what we gamers want and it's
a feature packed, stable, well performing product at a decent price. If PowerColor
had chosen to put an Aureal Vortex2 chip onboard, this motherboard would have been
unbeatable. However, because of the high price of the Vortex2, it was not a
feasible solution, but you will not be disappointed with the Yamaha XG 724/740
as we definitely were not.
