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Creative Labs Annihilator2 Review - Introduction: Part Two
By: Brian Gray - July 15, 2000
So where were we? Drivers. The latest release of the FastTrax driver is now up to version 5.32 of the reference driver matching the impressive pace at which the reference builds are leaked.
Since Creative is living up to their promise of updating the FastTrax driver within a week of the reference updates, the FastTrax drivers have earned a permanent starting job on my PC. Besides, they are more flexible and tweakable than the reference drivers from NVIDIA.
So what's next in the review? You guessed it - benchmarks.
While most web reviewers have very specific formulae by which they execute the benchmarks for a given video card, I have given up on that. Why? Well, I realized that most gamers play with sound on, with all the eye candy possible, and at the highest resolution before the minimum framerate becomes unacceptable. Hardly the manner in which Dr. Tom Pabst (heh) benchmarks.
So I decided to drop the pomp and circumstance. For each set of benchmarks I used my gaming preferences. I only changed resolution or color depth and I ran the benchmarks with out fresh restarts and sometimes right after surfing the web or editing this review. While this may seem unscientific, and I would have to agree, it does make the benchmark real.
I wondered if I should post my configurations. Not really important either because I doubt anyone out there has a PC exactly like mine. In Quake 3, though, if it's an option, it's on. Not much like a professional gamer, but I enjoy the visuals as they are part of the gaming experience.
In case you must know...
- Celeron2 566 at 850MHz
- 128MB PC100 SDRAM
- 9.1 GB U2W SCSI HD
- Aureal Vortex2
Along with the normal but "dirty" benchmarks, I also ran tests with increased clockspeeds. Here's a bit more on that...
Cranking The Clocks
With improved memory yields alogn with the GeForce2 die shrink, the Annihilator2 overclocks like there is no tomorrow. The settings above are my defaults using Fast Trax. I can run it higher, but I want to make sure the card will last until the NV20 hits. Of course the memory clock increase is most significant to performance, opening up the pipeline to push more 0's and 1's from the memory onto the screen.
Recent news of 400MHz DDR memory hitting the street is even more promising as a demo card has been able to crack 472MHz. DDR memory is maturing rapidly and promises to alleviate the memory bandwidth bottleneck on the GeForce2 and future NVIDIA products. When asked if Creative was planning a switch to the faster DDR SDRAM, I received an official no response. If you're holding out for the 400MHz DDR Annihilator2, you may want to just wait for NV20. In the meantime, I was very pleased with the additional 30MHz core and 39MHz memory I get by pushing the card.
Here come a couple of pages of benchmarks followed by my commentary and more FSAA observations.
Next Page: Quake 3 Arena
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