Price: $235+ street
Availability: Now
Back in March, we reviewed Creative's GeForce 256 DDR video card, the Annihilator Pro. It managed to earn an overall score of 8.5 by impressing us with its speed and feature set. Now, about seven months later, we're taking a look at the next step in Creative's video card line, their 3D Blaster Annihilator 2, a 32MB GeForce2 GTS-based card.
On the hardware level, the Annihilator 2 is a bare bones stock GeForce2 GTS. Its GPU is clocked to 200MHz. With four pipelines capable of drawing one pixel per clock each, with two textures per pixel, the card has a stunning but now standard 800Mpixel fill rate and a 1.6Gtexel fill rate. It carries 32MB of DDR SDRAM running at 333MHz DDR, which is the standard for GeForce2 GTS cards, and supplies over 5GBps of memory bandwidth.
It does not come with a digital output or TV-out. It does not come with impressive cooling and it does not come with 3D glasses or any other fun little bells and whistles. Cooling is supplied by a small, stock fan/heatsink combination. If you are a serious overclocker, this combo will not do you much good at all. Physically, the Annihilator 2 is a stripped down GeForce2 GTS that appears to follow NVIDIA's reference design as gospel. Of course, a GeForce2 GTS stripped down happens to run like the wind.