The Viper V330:

by Diamond

The Diamond Viper V330 is based on the Nvidia Riva 128 chipset. The Riva chipset supports both the Direct 3D and the OpenGL standards. The cards come configured with 4MB of SGRAM in either PCI or AGP busses and this review is of just the PCI version.

First Impression

I was impressed with the Viper’s performance, the Riva chipset is a good performer for 2D as well as 3D. There were some installation quirks that I will explain later, but all in all it is a good performer.

Installation

Installation of the Viper V330 wasn’t as easy as I would have liked. There are some issues that you have to be aware of in order to install the card correctly. I have installed the card into two different machines, the test machine, and a associates machine. I had two different types of problems in each case, both of which caused the video card to not operate properly. However once the problems are understood they are easily avoidable. In the first machine the problems was simple. The Riva chipset requires that it be assigned a IRQ by the machine’s bios to operate properly. In the case of the test machine this option was turned off in the bios. It was a simple matter to turn this back on and the video card performed fine after this. It is a bit of a concern that the card eats up a IRQ especially in today’s IRQ hungry systems, but I think that you will find the loss of a interrupt worth it.

The second machine was a bit more of a headache. The card was being assigned a IRQ, but for some reason Windows wouldn’t start after the video drivers were installed. It was having a problem with a file called VGARTD.VXD. I deleted this file and Windows complained about this file being missing, but otherwise started fine. A trip over to the Diamond web page informed me that this file was for the AGP bus, and wasn’t required. In order to get rid of the startup error some registry editing was required. This cleared up the problem and the machine now performs well with the card. This may have been because the driver set was for a AGP version of the card, so be careful when you download a new drivers set and make sure you get the version that corresponds to your machine.

Both of these problems are easily avoidable, and have fairly simple solutions, so you only have to worry if your motherboard’s BIOS is older and doesn’t seem assign a IRQ to the VGA card. In that case you should be looking for a update to your BIOS.

Performance

I performed a benchmark on the card using Ziff Davis Labs’s 3D Winbench 98, and Winbench 98 to test 3D and 2D performance. The Viper V330 scored a 201 on the 3D bench and a 77.9 on the Business Graphic Winmark. This is a pretty decent score all in all. This will become apparent as more benchmarks are performed and their results published.

The Viper V330 performed almost all of the 3D Winbench quality tests, more than any stand alone video card that I have tested to date. There were a few anomalies that cropped up in the tests, with some extraneous artifacts showing up in a couple of the tests. These were the exception to the rule however since on most of the quality tests the Viper gave up good results.

Diamond has also now released a “Release Candidate” version of their drivers that includes OpenGL support. I downloaded and installed these drivers and was pleasantly surprised at the quality they gave in Quake 2. The card performed a bit strangely at times when performing the Quake 2 benchmark, getting a little jumpy when a lot of things were going on, but speeding up when things calmed down. However the quality was excellent, and be aware that these are not final versions of the drivers. The Quake 2 benchmark performed at and average 12fps, running through the demo level in just under a minute.

The Verdict

A good card with good performance. I wouldn’t hesitate tell someone to take a look at this card if they want decent 3D and 2D performance wrapped up in one package. But do go to Diamond’s web site to get the newest version of their drivers.

In future reviews I will be taking a look at other video cards based on the Riva 128 chipset, as well as cards with other flavors of chipsets. So stay tuned, more is to come.

3D Benchmark 201

Business Graphics Winmark 78

FPS in Quake 12

Product Price (suggested retail) $170