Test System

System one:

• PPro 180, 32 meg EDO and 256 cache
• Matrox Millenium 2 meg/Velocity 128
• Orchid Righteous 3d 2 meg texture memory
• 8x Toshiba EIDE CD
• WD 1.6 GB
• TB Tropez
• Thrustmaster F22 and TQS, CH pedals
• CH Fighterstick and Pro Throttle

System two:

• Intel Pentium II, 300 MHz, 64 meg SDRam, 512 K cache
• ASUS P2L97 main board, LX chipset
• Velocity 128
• 12x Plextor SCSI CD
• Seagate Cheetah SCSI-3 4.1 GB
• Ubisoft Game Theatre 64
• Yamaha 200 watt 4 channel surround sound system
• Microsoft Sidewinder Force Feedback Pro
• CH Pro Throttle

I've been looking forward to getting my PII system up and running, and when my ASUS board pulled into town I knew my day had arrived. Course assembly is no mean feat for a guy who installs a system board once a year, but a mans gotta do what a mans gotta do.

STBs board comes with the latest D3d killer, the RIVA 128 chipset. This chip speaks to its onboard video RAM (SGRAM) via a 128 bit data path at 100 MHz, offering a throughput of 1.6 GB/s. The high memory bandwidth as well as the design of the Riva 128 give this card an amazing 3D power, making it the fastest 3D chip for PCs currently available. It has 3.5 million transistors, 12kb of memory cache and can execute 20 billion operations per second. The chip also offers video compression and video in/out so you can output your data to your home TV set.

In fact, the board features BOTH composite and S-Video connectors on its backplate. The cables for both connections are included as well as a stereo cable to run from the board to a VCR or TV input. Note however that you must select which type of display you want on the tab in the display properties section for TV-out. The board will not display both at the same time.

The blazing 3D performance of the Velocity 128 is combined with solid 2D performance on the same board, being as fast as the Matrox Millennium in all but NT under true color. But who cares? No dedicated sim fan is going to buy the board for business apps anyway, and the difference is not very substantial. With Vesa 2.0 built in the board has a high excellent compatibility and no need of a software Vesa driver.

What is amazing about this board is that it is about 33% faster under D3d than the current 3dfx boards. But thats not the whole story; in some situations its almost three TIMES the speed of the benchmark R3d and Monster 3d boards. Check out these charts from Toms Hardware page:

The reason for this showing is that as soon as the textures get larger than the onboard texture memory, textures have to get transported from main memory. With only 2 meg of texture memory the Monster 3D reaches its limits at a resolution of 640x480.

Installation was a snap into both systems, and the current drivers (1.11) seem to be very stable. Time to do some serious comparisons, so I loaded up Flying Corps Gold on my PII system with the Righteous 3d in place, spent fifteen minutes with it, then swapped in the Velocity 128 and then ran Flying Corps again. Voila! The speed increase was noticable. Picture quality of the Velocity 128 is as good as 3Dfx. The RIva 128 chipset actually supports more features than the Voodoo, but in current implementions of software you won't notice this.

I've had mail questioning the limits of this board. The card can't use more than 4 MB video SGRAM, which limits the highest 3D resolution to 960x712 pixels. 3d accelerated resolutions can be limited even more since texture memory is assigned dynamically from the total 4 meg. In 2D the Velocity 128 will do 1600x1200 in high color. My monitor isn't capable of that resolution so I couldn't test that mode.

Like STBs other products the Velocity 128 is covered by a full lifetime warranty. About the only known bug in the version 1.2 drivers is a Suspend mode glitch that can cause lock up in WIN95.

Go to the STB web site.

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