Installation of the Annihilator went pretty quick. I didn't have to install any drivers at all as the old video card was an Asus V6600 GeForce running reference drivers. Just pop the Asus V6600 GeForce card out, pop the Annihilator in and you're ready to play. I tested the Annihilator Pro on my Athlon system running at a fairly fast 850Mhz.  The rest of the stuff are:

• Athlon @ 850Mhz

• Asus K7M

• In Win 24" ATX Case With 300 Watts PS

• 128 Megs Corsair PC-133 SDRAM

• Acer 50X CD ROM

• Quantum KA 17 Gig 7200RPM ATA/66 Hard Drive

• Diamond Monster Sound MX300

• Smartfast PCI NIC

• Windows 98 SE

The card seem to work flawlessly at first. Quake 2 was totally payable at 1600 x 1200. A timedemo shows it runs over 60 frame per second at that resolution! However Quake 3 gave nothing but trouble. The game would freeze after about 5 minutes. I tried everything I could think of to fix it but the problem never went away. This is very strange as the Asus V6600 is a GeForce 256 card and it ran Quake 3 in the Athlon system without any problems. A check with some fellow tech friends showed that GeForce cards has compatibility problems with the Asus K7M motherboard. Sometime you luck out and get one that will work and sometimes you don't. I was one of the don't.

I decided to do the rest of the review on the LAN 605 system, which is basically the same as the Athlon system expect for the Abit BE6 motherboard and Celeron CPU running at 605Mhz. The Quake 3 timedemo was ran on the default "high quality" setting found in the graphic options, which are:

Resolution: 800x600
Graphic mode: HIGH QUALITY
GL Driver: DEFAULT
GL extensions: ON
Color : 32 BIT
Full screen: ON
Lighting: LIGHTMAP
Geometric detail: MEDIUM
Texture detail: 3
Texture quality: 32 BIT
Texture Filter: TRILINEAR

The game options are:

Marks on walls: YES
Ejecting brass:  YES
Dynamic lighting: YES
Identify target: YES
High quality sky: YES

Benchmark Scores

The Quake 2 benchmark scores are pretty much the same as the Asus V6600 Deluxe. Not surprising since the DDR RAM don't kick in till you turn on 32 bit color. The Quake 3 benchmark show over 10 frames per second advantage over a SDR GeForce. While the benchmarks are among the highest I've ever seen, there is still a lot of power left in the Annihilator Pro. To unleash this extra power, we just have to overclock the card.

Next page: Overclocking the Annihilator Pro

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