Review Date: December 29, 1998 Company: PowerColor Inc. Background Info: PowerColor is a new company in
the PC industry. Based in Taiwan (as many other big companies like ASUSTek are),
they have just started up in 1997 and because of their small size, they are primarily
targeting the retail market instead of the OEM market. One thing to note is that
other than video cards, they also make motherboards, sound cards, and DVD kits. Their latest offering is in the form of a 3DFX Banshee reference design which is called the evilQUEEN. Nothing out of the ordinary here, just about all Banshee cards out there are reference designs. Why? Well I think the answer is pretty straight forward: Banshee cards were never meant to be inspirational cards with performance that blew the roof. They were only meant to provide people a single card solution with outstanding 2D and good 3D. The reference design from 3DFX does this well, so manufacturers felt no need to change it. However, to distinguish themselves, PowerColor did choose to add some very welcome improvements to the already good reference design. For one, they choose to go with the faster 16MB of SGRAM rather than SDRAM. As far as I know, the only other Banshee boards to use the SGRAM is the Diamond Monster Fusion and the Elsa Victory II. And by the reviews out there, these cards seem to garner the highest scores. The second addition was a heatsink and fan combo. We have not seen any other Banshee card come with a cooling fan (only heatsinks). Cooling 3D chips these days has been proven to be very important. Not only does it allow your card to run more smoothly (with no crashes) but it also allows you to overclock it a little bit to gain marginally better performance in 3D apps. The fan supplied on our AGP card is pretty thin, just a tad bigger than the TennMax Lasagna X cooler. Sharky Extreme noted that their fan was quite large, and they wouldn't be able to fit another PCI device beside it. I guess PowerColor fixed this before they sent us the card. In any case, the heatsink and fan is a very nice addition. Next Page: The Banshee's Specs
The Hardware Pros are not
responsible from any damage resulting from overclocking. |
