Written: 5/27/99
Written by: MotoŽ
Viper V770 Supplied by:
AMK Services
Price: $169 - $199US ESP
Ship Date: Available Now
The new Diamond Viper V770 is a mix emotion
video card. On one hand it has all the 3D features one can want. 32 megs of ram,
large texture support, AGP 2 and 4 times, etc. However, on the other hand, the
NVIDIA TNT2 chip this card is based on runs at only 125Mhz core and 150Mhz
memory. This makes the V770 not much faster than an overclocked Viper V550. If
it were not for the fact that this card could overclock so well, I would have
toss it in the trash can.
I knew the V770 was going to give great
visual quality. However I wasn't expecting it to break any speed records posted
by the Voodoo 3 3000. Originally, the V770 was suppose to ship with a core speed
of 143Mhz and a memory speed of 166Mhz. Then Diamond posted that the shipping
card will be 125/150. It seem like TNT all over again (the first TNT card was to
ship at 125Mhz but later it was lowered to 90Mhz).
Luckily this just seems to be Diamond playing
it safe, as I had no problems what so ever overclocking the card to 143/166. As
a matter of fact I manage to get the V770 to run at 170/200! This is faster than
Diamond's V770 Ultra. At 170/200, the V770 shows the true power of the TNT2
chip.
Diamond sells the V770 on their web site for
$199. This is not a cheap card, but it does pack allot of features, including 32
megs of ram. Twice the amount of the Voodoo3. If you don't want to pay this much
money for a V770, you can pick up a 16 meg version of the V770 for about $125. A
really good deal indeed. The more I played with the V770, the more I like it.
The visual quality is truly stunning. I can't think of a better video card in
which to run Quake 3. At 800x600x32 bit with max texture quality, it paints a
picture that 3Dfx would die for.
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