It Bites like a Viper

Product name : Diamond Viper V330
Manufacturer : Diamond Multimedia Systems (http://www.diamondmm.com)

Overview

I have just received this board, in an OEM package, destined to developers. Inside the little white box, there is the board and a CD-ROM with drivers and on-line manual, together with a little paper sheet, containing some programming tips for the new Nvidia RIVA128 chip. Anyway, the retail box (showed above) is colorful, with the Diamond logo on one side, as usual, and a combat plane on the front. The board is little, but very ordered: the main chip is surrounded by the 4 memory modules, and on the left there’s a feature connector.

Installing the board is very easy: it’s enough to put it in one free PCI slot, and reboot the system, installing the proper drivers.

I must say that this board really rocks. I will say more in the benchmark section, but it is a rocket in 2D (never seen such a fast PCI board), and in Direct3D outperforms 3Dfx by about 10%. So this would seem a really great board, especially considering that it’s quite low priced, for what it offers. And in fact it’s a very good board, with just one defect: it hasn’t a dedicated API. I mean: this board can run 3D applications written for Direct3D under Windows95 and OpenGL under NT (a Win95 OpenGL port is expected soon) at a considerably high speed, but it doesn’t allow programmers to write programs RIVA128 only, a thing that’s possible with 3Dfx through GLIDE. So, this board accelerates all the titles written in one of the previous APIs (D3D and OGL), but no API can directly take advantage from its inner features. So You must know that many games have been ported to GLIDE for 3Dfx, and offer very good performances. So buy this board if You need a VERY fast 2D board with excellent 3D capabilities, both in window and full screen.

There are also other minor defects: first of all the impossibility to expand the board memory, limited to 4Mb. Another little defect is that the RIVA128 chip is very CPU dependant: this means that this board will rock on fast systems (such as MMX Pentium or P2 CPUs, but will run much slower on entry level CPUs. Anyway, even with slow CPUs this board offers really good performance. It’s only that the Riva performance scales with CPU power.
 
 

 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. 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. I will compare the 3D with 3Dfx, and, if I receive it, with a PCX2 PowerVR based board, the 2D with a Rush board.

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