Review - GA-630 (Banshee) from Gigabyte
Monday - January 11, 1998 - Hilbert Hagedoorn

Remember those motherboards from Gigabyte ? Well, i do ! Nowadays they also produce videocards and man, what a good job they do.

Today we will be reviewing their GA-630 (Voodoo Banshee). Do you want a quick first impression ? Okay, this card is making me float about 10 inches above ground level. Its a very good card for an even better price. (Okay okay, so the name GA-630 is not really creative and quite honestly suxx but hey. Who cares right ?)

The Banshee series will/is probably one of the best selling 3D products since the release of the 1st generation Voodoo 1 cards. It has been no more then about 2 years that 3D accelerated cards entered the mighty PC market. In those two years competition was/is high, therefor in the ongoing struggle to beat the best 3Dfx came with a project called Banshee about a year ago. Everybody was very curious what this card could do and yes ... would it not be an adon card ?

The dream of a lot of users became reality in November 1998. The 1st real Banshee card had arrived, a very strong 2D card combined with the mighty power of Voodoo2 and Voodoo graphics/Glide compatibility.

Today we will be reviewing and testing this lovely product.

This review will include some benchmarks based upon a Asus P2B, Intel P-II 350 MHz and 128 MB system. We will be using Diamonds Monster 3D, California Graphics Wizard 3D, Magic 3D II and MagicTwinpower for comparisation.

• one Voodoo2 TMU with 16 bit output
• 28 bit architecture 2D/3D accelerator
• AGP 1x with PCI functionality (no DME) with sideband addressing
• color depths of 8, 16, 24 or 32 bit for 2D, 16 bit for 3D
• resolutions of up to 1600x1200 in 2D, 1280x1024 in 3D
• Z-Buffer depth of 16 bit
• 250 MHz RAMDAC/100 MHz core clock

Installation

Every time i install a new card it seems to be getting easier and easier. If you are running Win98 (like i do) then the card will almost install itself. Its fully plug and pray compatible and has drivers on the driver-cd.

But hey, make sure that you have installed the latest DirectX drivers ofcourse.

If you have previously owned a voodoo based card then its possible that you encounter some registry problems. goto www.3dfx.com and look at the banshee Faq. It has downloadable registry fixes.

Bundled Games/Drivers

The key formula for a lot of companies these days is to make a hardware package without software. This way they can sell the card cheap. (lets face it, we all own heaps of games !) So why pay more for games that we probably have or are outdated in three months.

Therefor you will only find a driver-cd compiled with the latest drivers, game-patches, benchmarks, some anti-virus software, Flash-software and ofcourse the latest DirectX drivers from Microsoft.

Personally i think it would have been nicer to see some more new game-demo's included on the driver CD since there is plenty of space left. on the other side, do you really care about some demo's ? performance vs price is what is counting here.

Differences Between the GA-630 and Magic Twinpower

Although i did not expect to see any major differences in card-design there was quite some difference on the GA-630. It most certainly has a new design, its close to the Diamonds Fusion and has a coolingfan mounted on the TPU.

The Magic Twinpower is as fast as a Voodoo2 card, really, the difference isn't that big, we are talking about percents here. However, the Ga-630 is WAY faster than an average Banshee card and is even slightly faster then a Voodoo2 card on some sections.

Another huge advantage over a Voodoo2 card is that is simply isn't an adon card anymore. Just simply plain 2d/3d The GA-630 is extremely fast in its 2D section. It has certain functions that accelerated the 2D environment. (100mhz single cycle 128bits Windows GUI acceleration). The 16 Mb SGRAM - Supports 3D resolutions up to 1600 x 1200 w/ Z buffer. The TwinPowers 2D core delivers near *Null Driver Windows performance and top DOS performance with an advanced 128bit engine and a 250 MHz RAMDAC.

Hey and you kwon what's so cool also ? the GA-630 is a totally blue colored card, i mean the print is blue. If you see it, you'll know what i mean, it looks so cool oposite to all green looking cards (Okay, the black colored MTP even a bit cooler) ...

User's guide

A well written User's manual with all the details you need is ofcourse included in the GA-630 package. Its in correct english and in (what i presume) is chinese. Step for step installation is covered by pictures, Thumbs up for the manual (Cool design too).

Tv-out

Unfortunately the card does not have a TV-Out option.

Overclocking & performance in general

Overclocking is a trend that we've all known & use since the first steps of Voodoo ... Diamond's monster II even has overclocking capabilities in its driver software. (with a slider you can choose your clock speed) however, overclocking really isn't a necessity anymore. Only if you own a really HIGH end pentium II (400+ Mhz for example) overclocking will become interesting. Why, well it a bad case of the bottleneck problem. Your processor cannot process anymore data upto a certain level. To put it in a simple words, your Voodoo2 card is processing geometric data faster then your processor can handle.
Look at it this way, blow 10 liter of oxygen through a straw, now blow that same amount through a garden hose of the same length, much easier eh ? You can compare the straw with a <233 Processor & the garden hose with a >266 II processor.
In the case of the Voodoo2 and Banshee you will require at least a Pentium II 266 to start seeing a significant difference in frame rate between Voodoo1 & Voodoo2 , in case of two boards in SLI configuration a Pentium II 333 isn't even fast enough showing a frame rate difference between 640x480 and 800x600. This shows that the frame rate could be a lot higher at 640x480 if the Voodoo2 would get enough data from the CPU. 800x600 and more is occupying the Voodoo2 more, so the time of waiting for the CPU is less.

* tested on a Asus P2B 350MMX Pentium II BX Chip set 128Mb PC100 SDram + 9 Gig Ultra DMA HD's, Windows '98, DirectX 6.x

The benchmarks are based upon these systems *

As you can see the benchmark comparisation between all Voodoo2 based cards is almost nihil. However, you can some interesting performence increase in the GA-630 vs the Magic TwinPower. All Benchmarks are V-Sync enabled (therefor FPS cannot be higher then 75 frames on my current system. Now here is a 3D-Mark comparisation between the two Banshee cards in the review.

You gotta love the GA-630 now!

SLI Mode - Wouldn't it be something ?? Well, gotta disappoint you here, Banshee cards can not be connected trough Scan Line Interleave.

Cool the that card !

The Banshee runs incredibly hot. Just try putting you finger on the heat sink for more than a fraction of a second. Yikes!  However, Gigabyte solved this problem by mounting an Aavid brand HQO-Fan on the TPU chip. You could replace the heat sink with a 3Dfx Cool cooling fan. But hey, do you need to do this?  Nah. Ehh.  I haven't seen any heat related anomalies, but the trend with video chips lately, like the TNT, has been to put out phenomenal amounts of heat.  Some manufacturers are shipping with fans already.  Anything to get the air moving around the card would help.

3Dfx Compatibility

Although banshee has some minor software compatibility problems then a Voodoo2 we cannot blame Skywell for that. All Banshee based cards have some minor problems regarding compatibility.

The Banshee uses a different Glide version than the Voodoo or Voodoo2.  There can be Glide version errors if you have other Voodoo cards loaded previously.  Creative Labs has provided a Glide switcher to allow people who want to run their Voodoo 1 and 2 cards with the Banshee.

Reports of success or failure running a specific game are somewhat inconsistent.  One variable seems to be the brand of card.  This is a bit of a surprise since most cards follow the reference design and use only slightly altered reference drivers.

Recommendations & conclusion

I once tipped the Magic Twinpower as THE Banshee card to buy, well forget about that (it is a very good product though) but the GA-630 is simply a bit better, cheaper and faster!Its pricing is very well and the card works very reliable. Only some slight driver changes have to be changed. (Tripple buffering is default on, this result in corrupted screen-output in a lot of games). However, they are working on this and i'm sure that their R&D will fix this in newer drivers. The web support is very good. Always the latest drivers online. The performance of this card is really excelent, the price is right, everything feels really good on this products (Did i allready mention the cool package layout?)

Pricing

If you are going to buy a Banshee then grab this product now. It hit the shelves last week and the price will be $112-115 USD (date January11, 1999) You simply get the basics (all you need) However, don't get me wrong here, for the bucks you pay you'll get the most bang! Its a very good and stable card.

* Just received the word that The card is in the shops as we speak.

For a final conclusion in weather you should or shouldn't buy a Voodoo2 or Banshee card i can say only this,

1) if you own a p233mmx or below with an 'old' Voodoo1 card then do not upgrade. Really your system will not benefit from it greatly.
2) if you own a Pentium II based system & you have Voodoo1 then is would be interesting for you to get a Voodoo2 based card.
3) if you have a system without a Voodoo card and you'd like to buy one ... then invest in the Voodoo2 or Banshee card it'll be worth it !
4) if you plan on buying a new system + new graphics card, then skip voodoo 2 and get this all in one solution.

Rating : an 9 (out of 10 points). Good customer support, high-quality, no game pack, no tv-out, but man what a great product!

Contact

You can visit and contact the lads of Gigabyte here:

Chinese: www.gigabyte.tw
German : www.gigabyte.de