Creative
Labs 3D Blaster Annihilator review
Posted by Adam
Klein on November 29, 1999
Company:
Creative
Labs Product: 3D
Blaster Annihilator
 Creative
Labs has been known to put their graphics boards out to the
market first when using new chip technology. This is good
for them since the people who crave for speed always want to
get a board based on this new technology. Such a person as
me.
I can remember wanting to
get a Voodoo 3 board as soon as possible when I heard they
were about to be released, but the only manufacturer to
choose from was STB (3dfx itself).
NVIDIA didn’t take the
same route as S3 or 3dfx did by buying their own board
manufacturing plants for their GeForce chips. Instead they
did they same thing they have done with their Riva 128, TNT
and TNT2 chips by letting others make the boards for them. I
think this is a smart part on NVIDIA’s part because it
lets others advertise and market the boards featuring the
chips.
Creative Labs is one of the
few companies sporting the new GeForce chip. The Creative
Labs Annihilator is a standard plain SDRAM based GeForce
however that doesn't mean it won't perform well, and I think
you know what I mean.
The only thing that made me
buy this board instead of any other board is because it was
out on the market, in limited supply, before any of the
others. Anyway, most of the board manufacturers are using
NVIDIA’s reference design so all of them should be
performing very similarly.
For sure, there are a couple
of manufacturers that have decided to go with their own
design, however at the time they haven’t proved to have a
faster or better card by going on this direction, maybe they
just wanted to cut costs by making the PCB considerably
smaller, the ELSA Erazor X would be an example of this.
I
think most of you know what to expect from a GeForce based
card so we won't bother explaining much of the
Transformation & Lightning or Cube environment mapping
features but instead we will give you the facts and
impressions we got about this board.
Go
to next page !
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