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RIVA Station goes offline for 24 hours at 24:00 this night !

I want to support the german Internet Strike for lower internet cost! In germany we pay $3.80 for a hour at night and over $10 over the day, without provider costs. So I could lease me a car for that money :-)
Read Info about that srike on this ZDNews page.

You can find new inoffical TNT reference drivers in the Web at the moment. These Version .37 drivers are available at a ftp-adress at Microsoft: Download
Bevor you use these drivers you should know that the newest manufactorer-drivers for your card are based on not offical released v0.38 or v0.39 referencedrivers!! (for most cards)
ThanX to Marlo for the info!

There´s a new Bios version for the 4MB Diamond Viper V330 (without Video out!!) available. Information to that (Beta?) Bios is not available: flash182b.zip ThanX to Master of Universe :-) for the Info.

The Webpage Classy Glasses reports about plans to convert the Spectra 2500 drivers for use that TNT card with H3D enabled games. The H3D System enables real 3D graphics at your PC. You can find more information about H3D at the webpages of H3D Entertainment.

3DMARK 99 is a new Direct 3D Benchmark software. It uses new DirectX 6 technology and is based on the 3D-Engine of the fothcoming game Max Payn of 3DRealms and Remedy Entertainment. The free 16MB testversion supports the screen resolutions 640x480-16 and 800x600-16. Higher resolutions and color depth is only possible with the full version 3DMARK 99 Pro.
I´ll use that benchmark in my future tests. Info - Download Page

Diamond released new Win9X drivers for the Viper V550 with RIVA TNT:

The following are drivers for Windows 95/98 version 4.10.01.0239 for the Viper V550 graphics card. Please view 550239.TXT for important driver information. Note: This is the driver that shipped with the Viper V550. Download (3,24MB): 550239.exe

Within the scope of the hardwaretest Erazor II vs. Viper V550 I´ve send a mail to ELSA and Diamond to get some answers about their cards.
Reimar Hantke, Diamond European Product Manager answered 10 questions about the Diamond Viper V550. Only the german version is online at the moment: Diamond zu Fragen über die Viper V550

Here´s a quick poll about cooling of the NVIDIA RIVA TNT:

How important is a cooling fan on a TNT card for you?

view results

New Demos released last week:

HERETIC II - Download 1 - Download 2 - Download 3 - (37,4MB) - Developer: Raven Software
That game is a 3D shooter like Quake, combined with the third person perspective of Tomb Raider. Note! You can read at Gamespot that the Demo will expire on 1/11/98!!

HORNET´S NEST - Info - Download 1 - (25,1MB) - Developer: Microprose
Top Gun Hornet´s Nest is a action Flightsim that has more action than simulation.

SNOW WAVE Avalanche - Info - Download 1 - (11,9MB) - Developer: Midas Interactive
Snow, mountains... Snowboarding.

There´s info at Puriefied 3D about the Canopus Spectra 3200. RIVAZONE reported about that card a few days ago. In contrast to the Spectra 2500, the 3200 uses fast 8ns SGRAM. Rumors speak of an advantage of about 20% in D3D and OpenGL.

Gamecenter made a shootout between nVidia´s RIVA TNT and 3Dfx´s Voodoo2. They used a STB Velocity 4400 and a Diamond Monster II (single and SLI) for compasion. You can find the article here.

STB released a new Win9X Beta driver for the Velocity 4400. There´s no support for that driver:

v4400_142.exe 10-22-98 BETA Windows 95/98 Display Drivers BETA Release 1.42 (1.5MB) WARNING: This driver has not been fully tested and is not supported by STB Technical Support.

On the german V3400TV specs page ASUS speaks of '16MB 128-bit 125MHz SDRAM Memory'. But that does not mean that the memclock is at that value! The card is clocked with 90 MHz chipclock and 112 MHz memclock ! Sorry for the wrong values from yesterday.

ASUS releases first informations about the V3400 with nVidia´s TNT. The AGP card ships with 16MB SDRAM that runs at a memclock of !125 MHz!.
The cooling of the TNT is done by a cooling-fan, like with the Erazor II and Spectra 2500. The card is availabe with and without Video In and Out. The Video I/O card is bundled with the game Incoming.

V3400 Info - English
V3400TV Info - Deutsch (with a larger image of the card)

Diamond released new NT drivers for the Viper V550:

NT4V55_2.EXE (1,0 MB, 20-Oct-98)
Viper V550: Drivers for Windows NT 4.0 v4.00.1381.0133 including OpenGL ICD support & InControl Tools v2.25, rel. 1098. Requires NT 4.0 Service Pack 3 installed. Autom. Installation or via *.inf file. Note NT4V55_2.TXT!

As you can see, my site has moved to a better place ! There are two way to go to this page:

http://www.rivastation.com is the german version of the page!
http://www.rivastation.com/index_e.htm is the direct URL to the english version !

so, update your bookmarks now!

Here it is! The English languaged version of my review of the ELSA Erazor II and the Diamond Viper V550. I want to thank Michael Birke and Arnold Winter for their great help on the translation!!!
You can find the review here: Erazor II vs. Viper V550

ELSA released new 2.0 drivers for the Erazor II. The drivers offer a free choice of screen resolution and refresh rates (Screenshot). ELSA also released a german pressrelease about that. (The beta´s I used in my review were 0100-0012)

ELSA ERAZOR II, Windows 9x driver and tools
ERA2_W9X.ZIP (1.50 MB) 15 Oct 1998 v4.10.01.0200-0003

Diamond released new Windows NT-Treiber for the V330 (RIVA128):

NT4V33_4.EXE (1,1 MB, 15-Oct-98)
Viper V330: For Windows NT 4.0: Driver v4.00.1381.0301g & InControlTools v2.21, rel. 1098. The installation starts automatically. Note NT4V33_4.TXT!

Within the scope of the hardwaretest Erazor II vs. Viper V550 I´ve send a mail to ELSA and Diamond to get some answers about their cards.
Ingo Nadler, ELSA Product Manager Multimedia took his time to answer my questions. The answers are a bit longer, so I´ve made a new page for them. At the moment there´s only the german language version of it available! I´m working hard on the translation of the test article. I hope to finished it this evening!
You can find the german version of the interview here: Antworten von ELSA zu Fragen über die Erazor II

Some may have noticed the new banner on top of this page: I´ve found a sponsor: NetPlayer.
NetPlayer is a german online-games-server provider. Besides of games like Unreal or Forsaken, you can play games online that do normaly need a IPX-Network. In addition there´s the online flightsim Warbirds available.

I´v finished my article of the ELSA Erazor II vs. Diamond Viper V550 test. The article is in German language. I hope I can finish the translation to English language until tomorrow.
But you can take a look at the German version at the moment:


	News archives: Oktober 1 - archives overview
	Topics of the month: Review: Erazor II vs. Viper V550