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Stripping the Helios 3D Voodoo2 of its shrink-wrapping and box you know what you're going to get. What we're dealing with here folks is a plain vanilla (no chocolate chip cookies or TV-Out here) straight reference design with a mat black finish for a circuit board and a 4/4/4 Voodoo2 layout. In plain English, this means that the Helios 3D2 harbors a single Pixelfx2 chip utilizing 4MB EDO DRAM
of frame buffer memory and two Texelfx2 chips each using 4MB EDO DRAM. As per norm, there are 24 memory chips amounting to 12MB of 25 nano second 100MHz single cycle EDO RAM, which is made by EliteMT. To the naked eye, it might seem that a corner has possible been cut by opting for EliteMT memory instead of the much more popular Silicon Magic. But make no mistake, EliteMT has indeed been certified for use with the Voodoo2 by 3Dfx Interactive and we found absolutely no reliability or over-heating problems throughout the testing procedure. As with any other Voodoo2 on the market, the Helios 3D Voodoo2 mirrors the 90 Mpixels/sec sustained fill rate for bi-linear textures, which by current standards is still high. Of course in February the 90Mpixels/sec seemed extraordinarily high but by the time nVidia's TNT and other next-gen 3D chips came along in Q3 of this year, the figure became surpassed and seriously challenged. However, plonk two Helios 3D Voodoo2's together for SLI power and most of you will already know that the 90 Mpixels/sec fill rate soon becomes 180 Mpixels/sec. This raw speed has yet to be matched. And these numbers translate themselves perfectly into the three supported API's that are Glide, D3D and OpenGL. And with SLI enabled, the Helios 3D Voodoo2 will still give you the fastest frame rates that you'll see at this stage of development within the 3D card world. In addition, Glide still appears prominently within the games industry and the Voodoo2 is the only way (other than the slower Voodoo and Voodoo Banshee) to be able to play such titles.
In terms of image quality and resolutions, the Voodoo2 is now looking a little dated with its 16 bit rendering ceiling. The TNT and the Matrox G200 are able to render in 24-bit color, which will become important when games that support this feature start to emerge just after the Xmas rush. Also a single Helios 3D Voodoo2 board is only capable of an 800x600 resolution and with SLI enabled this increases to 1024x768 (at a price of another board). Again, the likes of the TNT and G200 can go much higher reaching 1600x1200. Very rarely are games playable in terms of frame rates- Motorhead and Motorcross Madness are possibly the only two that we know of and providing that you have at least Pentium II 400MHz. The final draw back of the Helios 3D Voodoo2 using 3Dfx's Voodoo2 technology is that there's no on-board 2D chip. On the one hand, you may already own a 2D board that you're happy with but if you want to sample some of the next-gen 2D boards for Windows 95/98.
Another gripe with theVoodoo2 is that it leaves your AGP slot redundant and therefor does not make use of AGP 2x like some of the newer all-in-on 2D/3D solutions. You'll therefor need to locate one/two PCI slots for one/two Helios 3D Voodoo2's respectively.
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