Guillemot
MaxiGamer Xentor 32 review
Posted
by Tom
Jensen on August 4, 1999
 Guillemot
has been around for a while, but they just entered the North
American market two years ago with the introduction of
gaming peripherals such as video and sound cards. The
MaxiGamer 3D, a 3D graphic accelerator based on the
industry-standard Voodoo1 chipset came to be their first
video card in 1997.
After that
they also released 3D cards based on 3dfx’s Banshee and
Voodoo2 chips but then with 3dfx acquisition of STB,
Guillemot was no longer able to use 3dfx chip on their cards
so they switched to NVIDIA’s line of chips. Guillemot also
specializes in CD-ROM/DVD, PC
& Game Console Accessories like digital control and
direct input, PC
accessories (joysticks), and Console game accessories such
as N64's vibration kit with memory. Seeing
Guillemot's background I had high expectations for this
card.
The
Xentor 32 card looked pretty spiffy when I opened up the
Fed-Ex box. It came with its own cooling fan (A definite
plus), a TV-Out for DVD playback or games on your television
(NTSC and PAL TV output), three CDs (A driver's CD, Kingpin:
Life of Crime, Speedbusters, and other demos), one fifty-six
page long manual, a thirty dollar rebate card (good until
November 30th '99), and an advertisement for High-IQ. The
card's RAM is clocked at 5.5 nanoseconds, faster than most
NVIDIA cards, being beaten by only a couple cards, one being
Creative Labs’
3d Blaster TNT2 Ultra.
Xentor
32 bundle wasn’t bad I must admit, it came with the full
version of UbiSoft’s Speed Busters, an OEM version of
Interplay’s Kingpin, XingDVD Player 2.01 for some DVD
madness and some other game demos such as Monaco Grand Prix
Racing Simulation 2, SCARS and Tonic Trouble. As you can
notice all these games (with the exception of Kingpin) are
from Ubisoft, which is also owned by Guillemot, that’s
why.
Installation
The
Xentor 32 was easy to install. Just open up your computer,
take your old graphics card out of your AGP slot, and put
the Xentor in its place and you’re done. I had installed
my own fan (Jerry rigged) on my current video card which
connected through my CD-ROM, but stupid me forgot to hook
that back up to the CD-ROM.
So
I opened it all back up again and I found my problem and
solved it quickly... Windows98 immediately found the new
card and installed default drivers and wanted to restart my
system. But I bypassed the restart, started up all the way
with only 640 X 480 resolution and 16 colors on the screen,
and then I put the Xentor drivers CD in. Easy cheesy, right?
Next
Page
|
