Magic3D from SkyWell Technologies
Please Drop news/questions to Hilbert Hagedoorn

Recently we received a test-board from Sky-Well to make a review on this board. Two persons have tested this board & each one of us will give you information on this product based on impressions, benchmarks & simply testing.

Once received, the package is looking very nice. It's a lot better then the Monster3D carton-box wich seems a bit 'dead' by me Someone told me 'but hey its just a box eh ?' Nope, its not just a box, if a product has to be sold its packacge should be very eyecatching, & Skywell made it a nice looking one.

After opening the package my first impression was 'geez ... thats a Diamond card without the logo on it' Really people, the layout of the board is almost (accept for some little smd-tech) the same. So i installed it without any trouble into my Pentium 120, 48Mb & 4 Gig System. Since the board is almost exact the size of the Monster3D my 3Dfx-Fan fitted on this board perfectly.

Since i'm running a comparisation to my Monster3D card the Magic3D card is immediatly overclocked at 60Mhz. No troubles in overheating here ... The Chips are nice & cool (Check out the 3DfxCool site for those fans!)

Once installed i started my system, since i've installed the most recent 3Dfx drivers on my system i didn't even had to install software from the supllied Driver-CD-Rom. Its working fine with the current drivers.

Benchmarks:

I ran 2 benchmarks with the exact same configuration on the 2 boards. Here we go:

                                        Magic3D                                Monster3D

Wizmark                             14621                                    14691

                                         80 Fps                                   80 Fps

ATB TV Demo                      69-73 Fps                              69-73 Fps

Now you can see for yourself, the difference between the Diamond3D & the Magic3D card are neglectable/nihil. Compared on hardware these two cards are almost the same, wich is logical since they both carry the same chipset. However i've been told that the Monster carries 4mb 50ns ram & the Magic carries 40ns ram.

What does the package include?

Ofcourse one very fine 3Dfx card, a user's manual, a list with current & future game & applications titles, a 3dfx game catalog & ofcourse a pass-thru cable. Furthermore it contains 2 cd's. 1 Driver CD with some extra's (utils) & a game on 1 CD (CyberGladiators from Sierra).

The user's manual is good, it's brief but tells you exactly what you need. It's writtten in English & Chinese (well, i think its chinese anyway ... ).

Final Conlclusion,

Well, overal i have to say that this card really is a fine one. Out of a ten i'd give it an 8. Monster3D has gotten a 9 but only for one reason, the monster comes with a bucketload of Software. The Magic3D card only has one Game & thats a little bit disapointing, but then again consider the very resonable price!, if you're not interested in extra software you should really consider buying a Magic3D Card its a very strong competitor for all other 3Dfx cards.

This card costs $ 180,- (at this time august '97) Thats a very competative price for this high performence card. You can get more info on the Sky-Well site.

Hilbert Hagedoorn, webmaster of the Guru 3D

Dave Sutton tested the card also on his system (Intel P100, 40 megs of system ram, 1.2 gig IDE HD, 8x CD-Rom, Diamond Stealth 2000 3D 4 meg, Soundblaster AWE64).

One thing I noticed about the Magic 3d, was that the pass-thru cable is quite good...it's the same quality as my Righteous 3D cable. The cable that comes with the Monster and Flash 3D seems to give you a more blurry picture. However thats just my opinion...

Here are the benchmarks I ran...

Wizmark 3.0 Righteous 3D- 12652.8 Magic 3D- 12735.1
Wizmark 3.0 Lite Righteous 3D- 190.3 Magic 3D- 187.8
MDK Preformance Test Directdraw Version- 49
Righteous 3D D3D Version- 255
Magic 3D D3D Version- 253
Righteous 3D 3Dfx Glide Version- 295
Magic 3D 3Dfx Glide Version- 294
GLQuake Timedemo2 Test at 57Mhz 640x480 no 3D card 12.1 FPS
640x480 Righteous 3D Default setting- 24.1 FPS
640x480 Magic 3D Default settings- 23.6 FPS
640x480 Rightous 3D tweeked settings- 34.9 FPS
640x480 Magic 3D Tweeked settings- 35 FPS
512x384 Righteous 3D Default setting- 25.9 FPS
512x384 Magic 3D Default settings- 26.9 FPS
512x384 Righteous 3D Tweeked setting- 36.0 FPS
512x384 Magic 3D Tweeked setting- 36.9 FPS
GLquake Timedemo2 test at 60 Mhz
Righteous 3D (won't run) 640x480
Magic 3D tweeked setting- 35.3 FPS
512x384 Magic 3D tweeked setting- 36.0 FPS

Thoughts: The Magic 3D has faster 40ns ram then the Righteous 3D's 50ns ram but as you can see the gains you get from overclocking is very small and probally not worth the extra heat it produced. I do think the Magic is probally a little more stable because of the RAM. The game it comes with isn't what I call great but I don't buy video cards because of game bundles. So for $180 dollars I think the Magic 3D should be everyones first choice if there in the market for a 3D only video card. I also tested this card on every 3D accelerated game I own and also a bunch of demos, and so far everything worked great, so if your worried about this being a lemon because of the cheap price, you can stop fretting. This card gives you the most bang for the bucks and I will recommend it to everyone until something better and cheaper comes along.

Card rating 7/10