I've really been trying to like Diamond and Creative Labs, but their products just don't justify my regard. This leaves me a lot more interested in what other companies are producing.

I've found the products and support from companies like STB, Orchid, and Guillemot to be superior to that of Diamond, and generally also to Creative Labs. STB sent me their latest gaming board, the Black Magic3D, to put through its paces.

In the box you'll find the regular: the board itself, an installation guide and registration card, driver/utility CD, and cables for SLI and passthrough. And don't forget those game demos! Bundled with this board are the enhanced full game version of Battlezone and Psygnosis G-Police.

The board looks like most other 12 meg Voodoo2 boards. These things are heavy and packed with chips. I've compared the Black Magic3d primarily to the Orchid Righteous II, because I've been running the 12 meg Orchid board in my machine for over a month now.

There are no fans or heatsinks on this card, but neither are there any on Orchid's board. I never had any lock ups during testing, though I have heard from other owners that STBs board is not a good choice for overclocking since it runs a bit warm. And since the folks at STB used some unusual "can" style capacitors instead of the more usual surface mount low profile variety, you are limited in your options of adding a heat sink to the chips (Tennmax makes one but because of limited clearance between boards it won't work on an SLI setup with the STB boards).

Installation was flawless, another sign of careful design. I went immediately to the control panel to set my refresh preferences and tweak the control settings. I chose my standard V2 settings so that I could make a solid comparison to the Orchid R3d 2.

I've been spending a good deal of time in both Glide and D3d lately, running the Total Air War beta as well as Microprose EAW and F4 alphas. My test comparisons were done on these as well as Janes F15, which has a very useful frame rate counter!

All tests were run with current drivers, 70 or 75MHz screen refresh rates, and no waiting on the V-sync. I used the same missions and setups in all sims, as well as running with all detail settings to the max.

Click to continue . . .

The results were not that surprising: this board ran all my sims at an identical speed to the Orchid R3d-2. In fact, the only significant difference between these two boards seems to be the software bundle. This means that the biggest consideration for sim fans will actually be the price. If you can get the Orchid at the best price, go for it. If you find the best bargain on the Black Magic 2, grab that one.

Its nice to know that whichever way you go you will get reliable performance and good support if you need it. You aren't likely to need it, either way! That leaves two questions: memory configuration and SLI.

Neil Mouneimne recently reviewed the Canopus Pure3d II. Here are his comments on memory configuration:

Gamers would be advised to discount 8MB boards right off the bat. There are already several available Glide sims that make use of the extra texture memory in the 12MB boards (and D3D games use the extra memory automatically, anyhow) and future games are only going to use larger and larger textures. Are you dreaming of those incredible screenshots of Su-27 Flanker 2? You can't even pretend to get close to that on an 8MB board.

There's just not much point in buying a new card with the old amount of usable texture RAM. An 8MB board may benchmark nearly as fast as a 12MB board, but outside of the limited scope of benchmarking programs texture sizes will tend to run wild. Consider that running short means that textures will have to be swapped from system RAM - such systems will definitely stutter more in heavily detailed areas.

The only other question to resolve is to SLI or not to SLI.... At the moment there isn't a huge benefit to connecting these boards while running sims. This will change with the release of DX6 and Glide 3, however. Falcon 4, Janes WWII Fighters and others will take advantage of Glide 3 and DX6 your speed benefit will be substantial.

As for comparison to other boards on the horizon, there are two coming on the market later this summer that are worth considering: the Matrox Mystique G200 and the STB Velocity 4400. But neither allow you the benefits of dual boards powering one game. With its SLI potential and its dedicated Glide API, Voodoo2 is still king of the hill.