Manufacturer - Skywell
Technology
Thursday, August 19, 1999 - Hilbert
Hagedoorn
Hardware used
Pentium II 350Mhz 100 Mhz Front Side Bus
Asus P2B Intel BX Motherboard
128Mb PC 100 SDRam
Software used
Windows 98 build 4.10.x
DirectX 6.x
Latest nVIDIA drivers (v1.88)
General
Magic3D TNT2 is based upon nVIDIA's Riva TNT2 chipset. And has 32 Megabyte SGRam onboard..
Package is bundled with a driver CD.
Lets get this review going people ...
Skywell technology has outdone themselves this time. With their desent, flexible and
dynamic market strategy they have expanded their Magic3D product line-up with several new
3D chipsets like Voodoo3 (reseller only), Savage4 and last but most certainly not least
nVIDIA's TNT2 chipset, which ofcourse we will review.
To put it in other words, welcome to the 3rd generation high-speed 3D videocards.
Skywell, as any other manufacturer had to go with a new chipset-manufacturer since the
3dfx/STB merger. They have choosen nVIDIA as their biggest partner for a well built
strategic alliance in the hardcore videocard bussines.
Skywell's TNT2 line-up will be consisting out of 3 different TNT2
cards.
- Magic TNT2 With 32MB @ 150 MHz
- Magic TNT2 With 32MB @ 150 MHz with S-Video & Composite
video out
- Magic TNT2 Ultra, the same as Magic
TNT2 but its floating at an incredible 183Mhz chipset clock and memory clock
- there will be a TNT2 version with TV-In and TV-Out
options also.
With a 150Mhz, 32MB SGRAM memory, 300Mhz RAMDAC equiped
Magic TNT2 you'll get about 300 Mega freaking pixel per second fillrate, 9M million
triangles/sec peak, massive 2.9GB/sec frame buffer bandwidth, and with excellent 3D Game
features like 32 bit rendering, 32 bit Z-buffer, 8 bit stencil buffer, anisotropic
filtering, bump mapping, it also includes DVD/MPEG-2 software player, and TV out function
(optional, PAL/NTSC, S-Video and Composite video output, SW-TGATNT2TV), to be a
complete solution in Multimedia system.
With AGP 2x/4x interface, full sideband support, AGP
texturing, Magic TNT2 can have a wide range of applications from the hottest 3D games to
full screen, 30fps DVD playback.
The TNT2 is manufacturered with a 0.25
micron manufacturering process. it currently produces 125-150 MHz chips. Later this month
we can expect the ultra TNT2 series chips which will go at the incredible speed in the
175-185 MHz range.
Compared to TNT (1) the TNT2 is ofcourse a hell-of-a-lot faster, but also carries AGP4x
support which will become available later this year (probably summer/fall '99). Another
great new feature on the TNT2 based cards is the ability to do hardware motion
compensation. This feature will reduce CPU utilization bigtime while playing MPG/DVD
(MPEG-2) multimedia files. Other major advantages are full 32Bit 3D gaming support and
ofcourse a texture mapping size of 2048x2048.
The box comes with no games and/or demos. Simply a driver cd. (you should however get the
latest drivers from nVIDIA.com) The included drivers were outdated. Furthermore a simple
but efficient and well writtten manual was included to get even the lame a TNT2 card
installed with ease.
Coming up - benchmarks
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