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Guillemot Maxi Gamer Xentor 32
by Tim "Flyboy" Henderson
 

"Guillemot" is the Canadian and French based sound and graphics company that burst into the North American hardware arena in 1997 with some solid products. Since that time they have produced some of the best price/performance ratio hardware out there.

Xentor 32

Guillemot is producing two TNT2 based products: the Maxi Gamer Xentor 32 TNT2 Ultra clocked at 175MHz, and a 16 megabyte version TNT2 clocked at 135MHz. The Xentor 32 is equipped with a fan, enabling a stable installation up to 190MHz on most systems while the standard Xentor is equipped with a heat sink only.

The Xentor 32 itself is extremely clean looking, and its size will surprise you, considering that it sports 32 MB of RAM. The fan is the typical heat sink mounted, thin wafer style unit. Memory on the Xentor 32 is 5.5ns and the RAMDAC is 300MHz.

Installation

Like their forebears, the Xentor boards are a pleasure to install. Simply shut down, replace your current video board with the Maxi Gamer Xentor 32, restart and pop in the CD. I had no difficulties and didn't have to consult the manual.

There is, however, a disclaimer attached. DO NOT use the default drivers supplied. Be sure to check Guillemot's site for updates, or else log on to Nvidia and download their most recent Detonator 2.08 drivers. You will gain both speed and stability.

Click to continue

 

F4 TNT2
F4 with 2d and 3d cockpit.

Mileage and Acceleration

The Guillemot Maxi Gamer Xentor 32 Ultra is a strong product. Guillemot set the Xentor 32 Ultra to a default speed of 175MHz, 25MHz faster than the reference board design and one of only two boards approved by Nvidia at that clock speed. The default memory clock of the Xentor is slightly below that of the Hercules Dynamite TNT2, at 183MHz compared to 200, but the memory clock on the Xentor32 can be increased to 190MHz using Powerstrip.

The Xentor 32 performed solidly using the most recent Detonator drivers. The 1.88 drivers were already quite mature, but at higher resolutions the latest drivers showed a slight increase. Falcon 4, remember, was written for DX5 and does not use multi-texturing. I expect that the best performance for TNT2 in combat simulations is yet to be seen this summer and fall with games such as Super Hornet, Team Alligator, B17 II and the like.

Properties Tab for Maxi Gamer Xentor 32

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Last Updated July 14th, 1999

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