Great value- M64
Written: Jan 31 '01 (Updated Jan 31 '01)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Cheap
Cons: None for the price
The Bottom Line: A cheap card which is good value
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| rob_writer's Full Review: Creative Labs Creative 3D Blaster RIVA TNT2 |
The original TNT2 was released quite a while ago, but the TNT2 M64 was released more recently as a compromise between power and performance on mid priced PC's.
At the moment it seems as if just about every PC below £1000 comes with Intel 810 graphics. While these are fine for general windows work they do struggle with the latest games, or infact just about any game which uses direct 3D. They normally come with only 4Mb of ram which is taken from the system, so a 64Mb machine would have only 60Mb RAM before it even started. Systems with the Intel 810 graphics would be fine if they came with an AGP slot, but criminally Intel failed to include one, so the only way to upgrade the graphics is with a whole new motherboard. At the plus £1000 mark PC's tend to come with the latest GEForce 2 card, which will happily play any game in any detail level you want.
I of course didn't want either of these, I wanted a sub £1000 PC that would play the latest games reasonably well, so I found one that came with the TNT2 M64 32MB card. I have tried it with quite a few of the latest games and found that it works well on them all, if you try to set all the graphics options to high then it will strugge, but you can normally make a compromise with the graphic details set to above half way. One thing I have noticed is that when a level on a game first loads it does slow down for a few seconds, but I have a feeling that this happens on most systems. The fact that my system has only 64MB of RAM also means that some games probably don't play as well as they could.
I was particulary impressed when playing Star Wars racer, when I cranked it up to max resolution and detail the game still played smoothly, the only problem was that the monitor was at a noticably lower refresh rate, still that was the fault of the monitor rather than the graphics card.
The card works well in windows too, but then just about any would. The card only comes with the basic monitor out port, a TV-Out would have been nice for those DVD movies but then I suppose you can't get everything.
The card costs only around £70-£80 so is set at the budget range of the 3D accelerators, but if you can live with not having the latest kit you can save yourself a lot of money, which would easily buy you something else to enhance your gaming experience, such as surround sound speakers and Soundblaster Live.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 135
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Epinions.com ID:
rob_writer
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Location: Cardiff South Wales
Reviews written: 22
Trusted by: 1 member
About Me:
Hi my name is Rob, I'm 18 and I live in the UK
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