Guillemot
MAXI Gamer Xentor32 TNT2 Ultra
Dutch : www.guillemot.nl
US : www.guillemot.com 
Thursday, August 19, 1999
Hilbert Hagedoorn
Hardware used
Pentium II 350Mhz 100Mhz Bus
128Mb PC 100 SDRam
Software used
Windows 98 build 4.10.x
DirectX 6.x
nVIDIA Detonator drivers 1.88
General
The Guillemot Maxi Gamer Xentor32 is based upon nVIDIA's Riva TNT2 Ultra
chipset. And has 32 Megabyte 5.5 NS DRam onboard.
Package is bundled with a driver CD and manual.
The Review
Guillemot is a company that we have all heard of. It has a very good
reputation around the globe. We loved their 3Dfx/Voodoo based products.
But do not forget Guillemot's Home Studio Pro 64 (a great professional
sound solution) and their nifty game peripherals like the Race Leader Force Feedback steering wheel.
Today we will put their latest and grates TNT2 Ultra based card to the
test. The card comes in a very cool box. (there is something special
about that Centaur isn't it ? The one on your right).
Like most manufacturers
Guillemot decided to produce two versions of their TNT2 based cards.
What is the big difference between a TNT2 and the ULTRA version you
might ask. Well, speed actually, nothing more and nothing less. Due to
a faster chipset combined with faster (in this case 5.5 NS) SDRam.
Tact frequencies. The
average TNT-2 card has 16 Mb and has a tact speed of 125 Mhz Core and
150 Mhz memory.
The Xentor32 has a standard configuration of 32Mb and tact frequency
is locked at 183 Mhz for its memory and 175 Mhz for its core. For some
reason the review sample that I have obtained had its core locked at
150 Mhz. Still
this is a tidbit strange. While reading other reviews on the web I
noticed that the core on their cards is at default 175 MHz.
Well, grab your favorite over clocker
and push this baby up. We found it very stable with its memory locked at 199
MHz and a core running at 175 MHz.
The 32Mb hype. The advantage of using 32
Mb over 16 is the ability of playing games optimal in 32Bit. Does the
extra 16 Mb help ? Well, when running in 32Bit colors and using 24-bit
+ 8-bit stencil buffer, of course it does.
With a 183 Mhz clocked, 32MB SDRAM and 300Mhz RAMDAC
equipped
Xentor32 TNT2 you can get about 300 Mega freaking pixel per second filtrate, 9M million
triangles/sec peak, massive 2.9GB/sec frame buffer bandwidth, and with excellent 3D Game
features like 32 bit rendering, 32 bit Z-buffer, 8 bit stencil buffer, an isotropic
filtering, bump mapping, it includes a Xing's DVD player software.
With AGP 2x/4x interface, full sideband support, AGP
texturing, the Xentor32 can have a wide range of applications from the hottest 3D games to
full screen, real time, 30fps DVD playback.
The TNT2 is
manufactured with a
0.25 micron manufacturering process.
Compared to TNT (1) the TNT2 is of course a hell-of-a-lot faster, Another
great new feature on the TNT2 based cards is the ability to do hardware motion
compensation. This feature will reduce CPU utilization big time while playing MPG/DVD
(MPEG-2) multimedia files. Other major advantages are full 32Bit 3D gaming support and
of course a texture mapping size of 2048x2048.
Furthermore a very detailed, efficient and well written manual was included to get even
the lame a TNT2 card installed with ease. The European manual comes in
several languages, Spanish, Italian, Dutch (yeah) and of course
English.
The manual leads (for Win 95 users) from the USB supplement towards
the complete and very easy to install video card.
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