Terminal Velocity  
Product name : STB Velocity 128
Manufacturer : STB Systems Inc. (http://www.stb.com)
Card review by : Marco Remondino

Overview

This board has a very good-looking box,  full of useful information about the board, its performance, its 3D features, the resolutions and refresh rates and the software included. A big picture of the board is on the back, where it can be seen how the product looks like. The board layout is very similar to that of the Viper V330. That I reviewed one month ago. The Riva128 chip is sorrounded by 4 memory modules, but this time we can find a chip (the BIOS) over them. Another difference between this board and the Diamond Viper I tested is the TV Video output, present here. In fact there are two connectors, one is Composite Video Line Out and the other is S-Video Output Connector. On the back of the box there are the pics of the three games included, that in my opinion are great:

• Interstate ’76
• Moto Racer
• FIFA Soccer 97

While the first two titles are Direct 3D enhanced (the first via a patch, the second out of the box), the third is not accelerated, and so can only take advantage from DirectDraw 2D capabilities of the board. Anyway on my system this game was very fast and good with this board. Besides games you can find other software bundled with the board, that is:

• Simply 3D from Micrografx, for 3D animation and rendering
• WIRL from Platinum Tech, inc – a 3D VRML Web Browser
• VRCreator from Platinum Tech, inc – a VRML authoring tool
• MPEG full-motion video playback software

So you can find 4 CD into the box: 3 of them with the games, and one with the utility software and drivers. Even if the drivers version is 1.16, that’s quite recent, I downloaded and use the 1.21 release, that’s been released only some days ago. Besides there’s the wonderful STB Vision 98 utility for Windows 95 that allows a great number of optimizations and brings some interesting tools (such as real time zoom, multiple screens and so on).

So this board is a great product. Unfortunately it has the same defects I already talked about when I reviewed the Viper, that are: memory limited to 4Mb and great acceleration but not through a dedicated API. Besudes the Riva128 chipset is very CPU dependant, so you won’t see great performance on low end systems, while it will fly on powerful systems (especially based on P2 CPUs or Pentium MMX). This board is compatible with D3D and OpenGL (the former under Win95, the latter under NT or Win95 through the Alpha Driver released by Nvidia).

 Technical informations

 The board is based on the new Nvidia RIVA128 chip, which can deliver true 128bit power.

There are 4Mb of SGRAM, able to handle up to 100Mhz (non-upgradeable, entirely devoted to Z-buffer; Textures are stored in the system memory), a very fast 230Mhz RAMDAC and a standard DB-15 with DDC support. Besides, as told before there are two connectors for TV output, that are Composite Video Line Out and S-Video Output Connector. The board, in order to work, needs one free 2.1 PCI slot and a Pentium 90 or better CPU.

 Display modes

Thanks to the super fast 230Mhz RAMDAC, this board offers a very high refresh rate at each resolution. Besides it supports 1152x864, that in my opinion is the best resolution for 17" monitors. On the 3D side, this board can do up to 800x600 with Z-buffer, running almost at the same speed as 640x480, even though it has nearly twice as many pixels; if you are not using Z-buffer, 1024x768 is also possible. At each resolution, both in 2D and in 3D, this board is very, very fast….really impressive, I’d say. Especially on Direct3D, this board really rocks.

 2D/3D Benchmarks

No benchmarks yet. This board will be compared directly with Diamond Viper V330.

Stay tuned.

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