Diamond
Viper II Z200 review
Posted
by Adam
Klein on March 24, 2000 - Page 3/6
Company: Diamond
Product: Viper
II Z200
Installation
and Drivers
The installation of the board
was fairly easy. I had one problem though. The Viper II is
very picky about what the AGP bus speed is set at. The board
refuses to boot up on anything more than a 75MHz AGP bus
speed. I enjoy the pursuit of overclocking my machines, but
the Viper II kind of limited this on my BX board.
With a VIA 133A based
motherboard, overclocking my system with the Viper II was easy
once again, since I was able to use a 1/2 AGP multiplier. Even
when using a high front side bus speed like 150MHz, the Viper
II maintained an easy 75MHz AGP bus speed. Since I had
problems with my VIA 133A based motherboard, I decided it was
best to test this board with my Pentium III 500E clocked at
default speed on a BX based motherboard.
Installation on the BX
motherboard was easy. Windows detected the board and I was
able to install S3’s self-installing drivers. I was new to
how S3 implemented the installation of their drivers, so I
took me a while to recognize this. Once I had the drivers
installed, I was ready to test this board out.
After testing the board out is
various games I was left with mixed feelings. Everything
played smoothly, but there were visual distortions that kept
popping out at me. At some joining of textures, there were
some obvious problems there.
The
ladder effect, as it is sometimes called, was very noticeable
at some of these texture joints. Other distortions included
texture drops and texture misalignment. I hope that these
problems can be taken care of in the future. These problems do
not occur in all games though, only in certain ones. OpenGL
games appear to have been much improved in visual quality
since the day of the first Viper II driver release.
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