Manufacturer: Guillemot Tech: PCI based Voodoo2 board with 12Mb 25ns EDO DRAM Bundle: Drivers and a few game demos Price: $159 w/ 12Mb

A full 6 months has been and gone and what a joy they were if you lived hand-in-hand in the land of Voodoo2. And as a gamer, if you've just forked out for a fancy pants Pentium II based PC with all the trimmings, you really want to be able to push your beast as hard and fast as possible right? To do just that, you're going to need the beauty and the beast within a Voodoo2 chipset- it's still the best a man can get (other than Gillette Sensor Excel that is). Voodoo2 killers have sprung up here and there but there's still nothing out there that really 'kills' it. The rush to get products out before Christmas is what's 'killed' the Voodoo2 killers...

When compared to its predecessor the Voodoo Graphics, the Voodoo2 stomps on it being some three times faster in terms of polygon counts and then approximately twice the fill rate. For any of you that want me to fanny about a bit I will. The Voodoo2's expandable architecture tops out at a bandwidth of some 2.2 gigabytes per second whilst pulsating some 50 billion operations per second. And according to 3Df'x's own press releases the Voodoo2 can also wallop out some 90million dual-textured, bilinear filtered, per-pixel MIP-mapped, alpha blended Z--buffered pixels per second. The figure of some 3 million triangles per second is testimony that '3Dfx likes it hot'.

The advent of 'entry' level Pentium II 300MHz PC's becoming more common than occurrences of aliens giving annul probe's to residents of Utah, has allowed the games and 3D graphics industry alike to have more 'oomph' at their disposal. Enter Quake2. Enter the Voodoo2. Get the picture? Alas, don't worry, I have (rather Guillemot has) the remedy, this is it baby- the Guillemot Maxi Gamer2 at a rock bottom $159. So how much beef does it pack then?