Skywell Magic TwinPower Banshee Review

Date: 11th December 98 by Vijay Anand

- The Good - The Bad - Test System Configuration - Conclusion - Rating - Other video cards reviews

Skywell products were mainly introduced this year into the local market and their presence was felt in many shops at SLS for their affordable (in comparison to other better known brands) Voodoo-2 gaming card for those who were strapped of cash and don't mind missing some software comfort features and games for a product that does it's job well. Their new Banshee card is no different and provides good performance but it's not yet seen in many shops. So for budgeters, here's another good card to stay tuned! 3Dfx always had a very good 3D engine and with their 1st mass marketed Voodoo chip, it was a success which yielded performance which that could not be matched by any competitor for a long time. Wanting to fulfil the 2D and 3D market, they then modified the original Voodoo a bit and named it the Voodoo Rush that was taged with another chipset vendor for 2D, which they used an Alliance Semiconductor's chipset. Unfortunately the 2D was very slow and somehow the 3D was not up to par with the original Voodoo. This time around, 3Dfx Interactive has tried again to make a board that can do 3D and 2D and has succeeded very well by totally coming up with a new 128-bit 2D core and combining with a 3D engine based on the Voodoo2.

These are the contents of the box:

• (1) Skywell Magic TwinPower Banshee board
• (1) Drivers installation Note

• (1) Skywell Magic Drivers and utilities/demos Installation CD

Unfortunately the box does not really tell that there's a quality product behind it. It's a mix-mesh of different game shots with a not so eye-appealing colour scheme. The box cover really needs to improve to show more quality and make more heads turn. The card comes in a much safer air-pocketed electrostatic cover unlike other boards that just use an electrostatic cover. Here's a snapshot of the board:

These are the utilities and software that are given on the installation CD:

Skywell Magic TwinPower Drivers & others	VCD Power Player
Voyetra AudioStation	D3D Bench Wizmark 3.0
Three 3Dfx demos	Mini-OpenGL Patch ver: 1.3

The board is compact mainly housing the Banshee chip behind the large green heat-sink and is populated by 8pc of EliteMT 2MB SGRAM of 8ns type. It has 2 feature connectors and of course a Flash-Bios. The Banshee chip is large because of it's 0.35 micron die. And it's after-effects will be seen in the Bad-section later. For your info, the green heatsink is held by 2 plastic and spring stubs that are fairly easy to remove in-case you would like to outfit it with a heatsink + fan unit. You will need a pair of pliers for that job but be careful not to severe any signal lines nearby or you'll end up having dead Banshee!

The given 3Dfx demos are extremely old and useless (They belong to the original Voodoo!).

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The Good

The Magic of Skywell

By now you would have noticed that the PCB used is black in colour which is very high-tech looking! Just the black PCB alone gives you a feeling that it's well engineered and indeed it is. Not bad for a not so well known brand. Of course it's basically uses the 3Dfx reference design but it has been modified a little and made shorter.

It's 250Mhz RAMDAC makes the whole screen sharper in any use and is crucial for higher resolution and refresh-rate usages. And yes, it's fast too! If your demands are not too great in the 2D area, this card can replace the G200 as the best in 2D and giving you plenty of speed in 2D and 3D on the cheap.

You'll be very surprised that it has no manual, instead there's small note, the size of your hand! It would be nice to have a few more instructions to tell us to change our display adapter to standard VGA first before attempting to install this card. It is simple to install but skimping on the manual seems very odd. The CD too does not have much more than what's stated in the note on installation.

Although after intstallation you'll see your adapter name is Skywell, a quick look at the display properties will tell you that it's the same as 3Dfx reference drivers. In a way it's good as 3Dfx does update it now and then so if you need a driver update just head down to 3Dfx which is faster than waiting for the manufacturer to release the next update. The controls are easy to use and are adequate most of the time, just no extras.

3D Quality and Features

The 3D quality looks like that of a Voodoo-2, but it's good. I tested games like NFS3, Star-Wars: Shadows of the Empire, Quake-2, Ultimate Race Pro and I ran the games at 800x600 and was very enjoyable.

The 3D Rendering Features as dictated on 3Dfx's web-site are :

• Integrated Voodoo2 pixel unit and single texture unit
• Microsoft® DirectX texture compression
• 100/125 Mpixel/s or Mtexel/s fill rate
• HW triangle setup capable of 4M tri/s
• On-chip high speed texture cache unit
• High precision 16-bit floating point Z-buffer
• Tiled memory architecture
• Transparency and chroma-key with color mask
• Alpha blending on source and destination pixels
• Dynamic environment maps
• 24-bit color dithering to native 16-bit RGB
• 16-bit color "expansion" to display near 24-bit quality
• Per-pixel table based fog/ haze effects
• Per-pixel MIP mapping, tri-linear filtering
• Full scene, edge anti-aliasing
• Bump mapping
• Optimized for local memory texturing
• Sub-pixel and sub-texel correction
• Perspective corrected 3D texture mapping
• Palettized and compressed textures

The Benchmarks

I have benchmarked the Beast in Windows98 with DirectX-6.

So here they are :