Thread carefully
Written: Jun 11 '00 (Updated Jun 11 '00)
|
Product Rating:
|
|
|
Pros: Good Performance Potential
Cons: Poor Drivers, Buggy support
|
|
|
| wchua's Full Review: Rio Diamond Viper II, (32 MB) AGP Video Card |
I bought the Diamond ViperII after being taken in on how powerful the card is. It also offered the promise of offering performance that is almost as good visually as the nvidia Geforce based graphics cards.
I was thus very disappointed with its performance when I purchased and attempted to run it.
Pros.
The card offers superb graphics output only when proper drivers used. The level of detail on certain games is visually stunning and smooth and is definitely better than even my beloved Diamond Viper V770 Ultra.
The card also offers much improve documentation over the traditional Diamond V770 Ultra line of cards.
Cons.
Please be very careful when you buy a brand new graphics card. It is important to find out whether if there is enough driver support. This is a valuable lesson I've learnt.
Most of my games would not work on the Viper II due to incomplete drivers. The output quality was unconsistant from game to game. In addition, my monitor kept producing flickering thunderflashes of multi-colored squares whenever I booted up. Sometimes the card goes into this mode after some period of relative stability - a very frustrating experience.
One other big issue. The Zoransoft DVD program that comes with the Viper II does not support AMD systems! I had trouble running the program after installation so I called S3's technical support and confirmed the problem to me. (I'm now using Creative Technology's DVD software instead on my V770 Ultra). The folks at S3 were in a process of getting permission from Zoran to release a program allowing the ZoransoftDVD program to run on AMD systems the last time I heard.
Conclusion
I've changed the Viper II card twice and I've gotten the same problems. I have since returned them both. Maybe its my system that isn't well configured. However, my Diamond V770 Ultra has been a true workhorse and I've had ZERO problems with it for 6 mths. I hope this review provides some advice to those who are planning a new card purchase.
Recommended:
No
|
|
|
|
Epinions.com ID:
wchua
|
|
Reviews written: 7
Trusted by: 2 members
|
|
|
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.