|
Diamond Viper V770 Ultra Review
Wrap Up
I was impressed with the Viper V770 Ultra, especially with the increased game performance it had over the Viper V550 in both 16-bit and 32-bit color. All benchmarks ran without incident even at an overclocked speed of 175MHz core and 200MHz memory.
Diamond's InControl Tools 99 are a step in the right direction in the area of performance tweaking, although the combination of using NVIDIA's reference drivers and Powerstrip offer more features and better performance. The catch is that to take advantage of InControl Tools 99, you have to use Diamonds V770 drivers.
Those of you in the market to purchase a new Pentium III based system should consider the Viper V770 Ultra. I would expect Pentium III processors to provide an additional 10-15% increase in performance over the Pentium II-450 I tested with.
Those of you that currently own a Viper V550 or other TNT based graphics accelerator and have a fast processor (PII-333MHz and up), may want to consider an upgrade. If you want to raise your systems 3D graphics performance up to the next level, the Viper V770 Ultra can handle it. In certain cases, upgrading to a faster 3D graphics accelerator provides a greater cost/performance payback than upgrading to a faster processor.
However, the TNT based Viper V550 remains an excellent graphics accelerator and will continue to provide acceptable performance in the next generation of games. If you are satisfied with it's performance, then consider getting a V770 Ultra down the road when prices drop or wait for the next big breakthrough from NVIDIA.
And finally, if it's within your budget, you will want to think about upgrading to a big screen monitor. With the V770 Ultra offering great frame rates at higher resolutions, your games will look great on a 19-inch or larger monitor!
Whew! End of review. Hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I did writing it.
Next: 3D Glossary
|
