Reviews / previews
There was no way Creative Labs was going to miss the TNT2 train. After all, its original TNT product, the Graphics Blaster RIVA TNT, was a big hit with consumers who trusted the Creative Labs name. This second-generation card aims to better its predecessor in almost every way.
Usually, Creative Labs' products are bundled to the max--you'll find everything you need to set up a product without having to make a trip to the local Radio Shack. You can say the same about the 3D Blaster TNT2, but as we dug into the box we couldn't shake the feeling that something was missing. The manual was there, the TV-out cable was included, the card was nicely wrapped--but where were the games? The only disc you'll find is the one that includes the drivers, Sonnetech Ltd.'s Colorific and 3Deep for color matching, and that's it. You won't even find any DVD playback software, as with the other TNT2 cards in this roundup.
Getting past the lack of software, we installed the card with no problems. But once we rebooted, the Display Properties refused to let us set the color at anything higher than 256 colors. A brief trip to www.soundblaster.com alerted us that a new BIOS upgrade for the card was available. It seems that with the old BIOS you'd get a problem that prevented the card from correctly identifying the monitor. After a simple copy-to-floppy-and-issue-the-flash-command procedure, the card was good to go and happy to comply.-- Danny W. Lam / GamePro
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