Annihilates the opponsition! (Creative 3D Annihilator)

Member Name: The Duke

Product:	Creative 3D Annihilator
Date:	26/02/01 (77 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Fast, cheap, good support, excellent drivers

Disadvantages: Older, hard to find

I know it’s fairly long in the tooth now, and with GeForce2 cards now coming under £100, you’d wonder why I am writing a review of a card that’s over a year old.

Well, the answer is this: the GeForce2 cards are cutting edge, and if you have a fairly old computer, then you may not want to pay the extra money for something that may not operate optimally, or at all!

I ordered my GeForce Annihilator card from scan.co.uk, and at the time, it cost me £99.99. Up to that point, I’d been using a S3 Virge with 12 Mb Voodoo2 (also, I was running a 300Mhz K6-2) and while happy with that set up, I decided to upgrade as I thought £99.99 was a good price for that particular card.

The specifications for the card (the important ones, anyway) are thus: RAMDAC runs at 350Mhz, memory of 32Mb, Direct X 7 compatible and has a T & L engine. Theoretically it’s capable of handling 15,000,000 triangles per second with a peak fill rate of 480 million pixels per second. Mean anything to you? No, thought not!

I ordered the OEM model from scan (i.e. drivers, but no free games), and I installed it immediately. Installation was easy, and painless – I extracted my old cards, and inserted the new one into the AGP slot. Upon rebooting the computer, I inserted the driver CD and installed the drivers. These installed easily , and one quick reboot later, and I was in business.

I’m not one for paying attention to frame rates, but I found that in first person shooters, I was able to up the resolution from 640x480 to 800x600 without any loss of speed. I also, after a few goes on Half-Life, bumped up the detail level, again without any loss of quality. It seems that the GeForce is very capable of coping with 3d graphics. One final test – I’d been having problems running the Daikatana demo under my old set up specification (i.e. even the menu was proving troublesome, never mind the game itself!), so I decided t
o give it on last try before uninstalling the bloody thing. Amazing! It ran so much smoother than before. Ok, I was still running it in 640x480, but at least it was running a lot better than before! (Crap game though :P)

Also, Nvidia's Detonator drivers are very good indeed (Now up to Detonator3), enabling you squeeze and extra bit of speed out of your card, even if it is over a year old.

So for those of you out there with a slightly older computer, my advice is to upgrade to a better graphics cards (if you’re a gamer) it may end up doing the same job as spending money on a new mainboard and processor!

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