If it weren't for online publications,
you probably would have never heard of Skywell Technology.
They were founded in 1989 and at that time only focused on the local
market in Taiwan and China. They primarily developed mainboards
and add-on cards for IBM clone computers. They then started to
branch out into the European market where they scored some very nice OEM
deals. Later on they also branched out into Australia and India
and are now attempting to break into the North American market.
Like many other companies, Skywell has
chosen to build cards based on the leading 3D chips in market from
3dfx and Nvidia. Since 3dfx manufactures their own boards now,
Skywell is only left with Nvidia as a viable option for top notch video
accelerators. In this review, we will be taking a look at their
Magic TNT2 card which is based on the Nvidia Riva TNT2 chip and comes
with 32MB of Samsung 7ns SGRAM. The board we got came without
TV-Out, but a version with TV-Out is available. This card does come
with an active cooling system (heatsink + fan) which seems to work a
little better than the one provide on the Leadtek Winfast S320 II.
Surprisingly, Skywell chose to set the default clock speed to 150/150MHz
core/memory which is practically the same as the TNT2 Ultra. The
memory can easily be overclocked to 175 and what you get is a virtual
TNT2 Ultra board for the cost of a regular TNT2.
In case you're not to familiar with the
TNT2 chip from NVidia, I've ripped this section from our Leadtek S320 II
review, so if you've already read it, feel free to skip over to the next
page. In a sense, the TNT2 is really what
NVidia expected the original TNT to be. The original TNT was
supposed to be based on the 0.25 micron process and run at 125MHz
killing the Voodoo2 at that time. However, it is very well known
that Nvidia was unable to
keep their promise. The chip had to be manufactured on the 0.35
micron process which rendered it incapable of running at speeds over 90MHz
without special cooling.
So at this point in time, NVidia has
finally changed over to the 0.25 micron process and those 125MHz+ chips
have become a reality. The TNT2 comes in two flavors, the regular
TNT2 and the TNT2 Ultra. They are really the same chip but because
manufacturing processes and silicon wafer qualities can vary, some chips
will be able to reach higher clock speeds than others. NVidia
tests for these chips, filters them out and sells them to board
manufacturers at a higher price because they can run at a higher
frequency. The TNT2's default clock speed is 125MHz while the TNT2
Ultra's default is 150MHz.
Nvidia has also stated that a few minor
modifications have been made to the TNT2's rendering pipeline which makes
it 5-10% faster at the same clock speed as TNT. Also, Nvidia says
32-bit performance has been improved significantly. DVD playback
has also been slightly improved to provide less dropped frames.
The TNT has some problems with poor DVD performance, especially on
lower end systems. Other than that, the TNT2's features are pretty much
the same as the TNT which already has a pretty complete 3D feature
list. The only thing I think is missing is bump mapping like
Matrox's G400. Anyway, let's proceed and take a look at the
complete feature list of the ELSA ERAZOR III.
