X24
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The Quantum Obsidian 2 X-24: A Gamer’s Delight
by Quantum 3D
Quantum 3-D was founded in March 1997 when the owner saw a need for low-cost, high-performance 3D solutions for professional, consumer, and Coin-Op computer systems. Since then the company has steadily increased in size, expanding their market base every year. This year, Quantum has released three series of cards, including their S-series Voodoo 2 cards, X-series Voodoo 2 cards, and their Raven–a Voodoo Banshee based board.
My first impression when I took the X-24 out of the box was “WOW!” what a monster. This card is huge and rightly so; after all, it packs the equivalent of two Voodoo 2 boards in a single-card, single-PCI slot solution. The card measures about 11 inches in length comes with four texture processors and 24 megs of 100Mhz RAM . It also comes packaged with a driver disk, a manual, two demo disks and a small yellow paper with a slightly humorous remark stating, “DON’T READ THIS! but since you are..” and then goes on to reference a portion of the manual about driver installation. The X-24’s manual was brief, but it did provide the necessary information for installing and setting up the X-24. The documentation also made it clear that old Voodoo 2 drivers needed to be uninstalled before proceeding. Useful information, but I wish the pictures included were more in-depth for inexperienced users. Another feature I would have liked to see was a fan to keep the X-24 cool, which I found was a problem.
Installation was simple but I did run into one small snag. The first thing I did was pull out my Diamond Monster II and pop in the X-24. The pass through cable on the X-24 is different from the Monster II and other Voodoo 2 cards because it has a pigtail on it rather than passing through the entire card. Another thing I noticed while installing the chip was the fact that the dual SLI configuration on the X-24 is accomplished by using a PCI bridge chip (Made by Digital) to basically “fool” the computer into thinking there is another PCI slot on the motherboard. A very nice setup because this means the computer will see the card as 2 Voodoo 2’s and Quantum 3D wasn’t forced to drastically rewrite the reference driver. Another interesting feature on the X-24 is TV-out which is available also on Canopus’s Voodoo 2 (Reviewed Earlier).
As soon as I booted up my machine the X-24 detected as a Diamond Monster 3D II (DOH!) but rather than worrying about it, I decided not to panic and just let it slide. After it finished detecting as two Monster II’s I proceeded to device manager, went into the driver for the Monster II and told the computer I had an updated driver. Next, I told the computer to update the driver and it detected as a Quantum X-24 and installed the proper driver (whew!). I was happy to see that once I had updated the driver for both detected boards, the card’s diagnostics ran just fine. You can usually avoid running into this problem by uninstalling the old driver, unfortunately I had to take this roundabout solution which seemed to work fine as well. The drivers are excellent, allowing for overclocking the card all the way up to 100 MHZ but I never felt the need to do this because performance was already excellent. The driver has settings for refresh and gamma correction in both glide and Direct-3D.
Once I got the card running, I decided to try out a little gaming with some of my best 3D games. The quality while running Unreal in 1024x768 was incredible, but not much different than other Voodoo boards in SLI. The card performed well and had no problems with anything that was compatible with my Monster II. I still can’t get Descent 2 to run but I think that’s because it’s Voodoo 2 incompatible. Benchmark numbers were on par with other Voodoo 2’s in SLI, although framerates are limited to 85 FPS because the max refresh is 85 HZ. Since over 85 HZ can cause quality to suffer on many monitors, I don’t think anyone will have any room to whine about this minor quirk. Benchmark number were good: In Quake 2 I got 56.7 FPS at 640X480, 51.1 FPS at 800x600, and 41.7 FPS at 1024x768. In Forsaken, I got 81.2 FPS at 640x480, 78.8 FPS at 800x600, and 74.6 FPS at 1024x768. In X, I got 84.9 FPS at 640x480, 79.8 FPS at 800x600 and 71.3 at 1024x768. These numbers were obtained on my P2 300 w/128 meg of ram and NO CLEAN INSTALL OF WINDOWS. I took the average of three runs at each resolution. This means these numbers will be a little slower than most numbers posted by other sites; however, these are the type of results you can expect on a machine that is typically used for gaming. I was able to test the TV out on my 32 inch Sony TV and found that in games the quality was excellent. The TV out even has some nice features for changing the centering.
After thoroughly testing this card with all manner of 3D games, I came to the conclusion that this card rules! The highs of this card are as follows: It’s a single slot PCI Voodoo 2 in SLI board, it performs great and has excellent driver support, The TV out function works great, It has Glide, Open GL, and Direct 3D support. The Lows of this card are its price ($499.95 MSRP), and large amount of heat it produces if your machine doesn’t dissipate heat well. The bottom line is this: if you have very little space in your machine and 1 PCI slot is all that can be spared, this is the card for you. If sparing two PCI slots is no problem, two 12 meg Voodoo 2 cards in SLI should suit you just fine and will be about 100 dollars cheaper. Overall, I recommend this card to anyone who can afford it, if only for the bragging rights.
Rating:
90%
Contact Tom at: smonter@micron.net [footer1.htm]