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Diamond is renowned for their quality. For the Viper V550 the reference design has been spit-polished and packaged to look like the sleekest deal on the shelves if a TNT is what you're gunning for. A straight AGP based reference design, with 16MB of 125MHz SDRAM, is all you can ask for when considering buying a TNT. With its 10 GFLOPS floating point geometry processor and Twin Texel processors, the Viper V550 does indeed deliver a good punch when it comes to 3D games but it's an all-round card and serves its purpose for that. We'll see how the Q2 1999 0.25micron TNT (ZX?) chipset performs under games. Hopefully it will indeed run at 145MHz. Then again by that time 3Dfx will most likely slap back with a twin TMU (go on lads why not go for four TMUs?) and a massive amount of memory on 0.25micron. How the plot thickens eh?
You'd expect nothing less from them on that score. With the a great bundle, that includes a 'special' full version of Motorhead (see review) which we all totally dig here at Sharky Extreme, the Viper V550 is certainly the most polished looking TNT board out there.
The Viper V550 allows for some extensive multimedia features via MPEG-1, MPEG-2, Indeo and Cinepak playback. The MPEG-2 option is only available on the AGP version of the Viper V550 though and the TV-Out option is there for people that are that way inclined. I've said it before and I'll say it again- if you want 'free' antialiasing on your TV whilst playing games then use one of those plastic toys that Nintendo makes. And to further the idea of the Viper V550 board being very much an 'all-round' 2D/3D board, you can also upgrade to Diamond's DTV 2000 for video capture and TV on your PC and turn your PC or TV into 'a deluxe home theater system' as Diamond has stated. All well and good but I hear your cry, "Enough multimedia till the year 200- we're all fragaholics here and want some spicy Quake2 action!"
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