Reviews / previews
I came into work a couple of days ago and received an emailed press release that said "S3 Enters Internet-Appliance and Home-Networking Markets Through Acquisition of Diamond Multimedia Systems Inc." Seems that Diamond Multimedia wasn't doing as well as we thought and was gobbled up by S3. Nevertheless, an S3 rep. assured us that the Diamond name will live on, as will its products. Good thing, too, because Diamond has an enormous customer following, and that list should grow if it keeps packaging solid products like the Viper V770 Ultra.
You want games? You got 'em! Inside the box you'll find Need for Speed III: Hot Pursuit, Superbike World Championship, and Wild Metal Country. Then there's Zoran's SoftDVD, Portola Dimensional System's Fremont SE, and a demo of 3D Sensations.
Installation was a breeze, with no hiccups or snags. The driver installer puts the Diamond InControl Tools 99 in your Display Properties tab for easy access to changing refresh rates, colors, and so on. Also included in the Tools is the 3D Turbo Gauge, Diamond's overclocking utility. It essentially has four levels you can set, from the don't-touch-me default of 150MHz engine/183MHz memory clock to a Level 5 setting of the maximum 175MHz/200MHz combination. Unfortunately, it doesn't indicate the megahertz at the prospective levels, so setting the gauge to Level 4 (the most stable level we could use before things started freezing up), we couldn't use this utility to tell us how fast we had set those numbers.
Diamond has always been good about releasing updated drivers on its Web site, but unfortunately, as with the majority of the cards here, the new Viper V770 drivers based on NVidia's v. 1.88 drivers weren't ready during our testing. However, Diamond claims that by the time you read this they should be ready to go.-- Danny W. Lam / GamePro
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