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The Viper II Z200 The Viper II Z200 is currently S3/Diamond's Flagship product, and it carries all the benefits Diamond usually endows to those cards. The review board I recieved (a box retail Viper II) came with 32MB of 6ns Samsung SDRAM, the Savage2000 chip under a large heatsink (but no fan this time), S-Video and RCA connectors for TVs, and the standard VGA out connector. Take a look at the board here. The first thing you will notice is the large heatsink. Despite the split .22/.18 micron cut, this board gave off quite some heat in my tests, which is probably why we have the enlarged heatsink. It was never enough to burn, but it was definately warm. This didn't deter me from overclocking, as we will see later, but you will want to have good, well-ventilated case for this card (as you would want to anyways). One of the most interesting things about this board is the clock speed. When the Savage2000 chip was announced, it was to come in 2 flavors: 150MHz/175MHz, and 175MHz/200MHz boards. This was later lowered, and the Viper2 now ships at 125/155.. or does it? The included RAM was high-quality Samsung fare, rated at 6ns. 6ns translates in 166MHz, but on my card it came clocked at 143MHz! This is even stranger in that some boards come at 155MHz.. there seems to be four revisions of the Viper II: A, B, 1A, and 1B. Also, there are two BIOSes: 105Cxxxx and 106Cxxxx. This is all very strange.. however, I have noticed that the entire board (PCB included) get's very warm. Of course, with the Booktree chip for TV-Out and 4 SDRAM modules, it's no wonder. But, I have never seen a card get as warm all over as this. This may account for the lowering of the clock speed. The TV-OUT chip is the BookTree 869 chip. However, as I used the recently released beta 4.12.01.9002-9.01.21 drivers, TV-Out was dysfunctional. This will be rectified in a new "file" for the Viper2, probably coinciding with the release of the next drivers. That's all I will say... On that note, let's move on to page 4: the Viper2 Drivers. Page
4: Drivers |
