3

Now thats a weird looking card eh?  I doubt that a lot of you remember the rise and fall of PowerVR?  This is the PowerVR Series 2, which arrived very late to the market.  In 1999 it ran at 125 MHz and had 32MB of SDRAM.  Here we are already at DirectX 6, a .25 micron fabrication and a 125 MHz clock frequency on the core and memory.

It was empowered by a chip called Neon 250 which packed a punch as it could handle close to 4 million polygons per second.  The late arrival and poor marketing combined with a now fierce market competition made the release a failure. 

Fast forwarding to May 2000 - Guillemot, later on Hercules also was renown for their graphics cards. This is their Hercules 3D Prophet II GTS. GeForce 2 GTS based. Hercules changed something in the history of graphics cards. They were totally into diverting from reference designs.

As a result look at the card above with the blue PCB, blue ram sinks and blue cooler. This is the year 2000, and cards just became a style icon really. This is the era where PC modding is invented and the PCs stopped being grey/beige and dull.

At this time our high-end test system consisted out of a Pentium III Coppermine 500E @ 667 MHz, i820 chipset at a 133Mhz FS, and ooh it was fast baby. Here DirectX 7 was just introduced and we where using Detonator drivers 5.16 (Detonator was later on renamed to Forceware drivers)

The flavor for this one is GeForce2 and it's labeled Pro, this card came from Gigabyte in the earlier days. It came with a 32MB framebuffer. The graphics core was running steady at 200 MHz. A high gaming resolution back the was 1280x1024.

Does anyone even remember Kyro graphics cards ? This is the VideoLogic Vivid! PowerVR series 3 KYRO.

• 115 MHz core clock
• 115 MHz memory clock
• It could handle 20 million polygons per second (peak).

This little guy was based on the PowerVR's series 3 chipset, KYRO, designed by Imagination Technologies and constructed by STMicro electronics. it's main competition ... the Geforce2 MX.

OCZ also had a graphics card bling back in the days. This was the GeForce 2 based 'Titan II' series from OCZ. The card had 64MB DDR RAM running at 460 MHz. The NVIDIA GeForce 2 ran at 250 MHz.

Oh and yeah .. they simply glued a second fan on the cooler and claimed it was the overclocking king of GPUs :)