I don't usually get out of bed on a Monday morning for many things but I made an exception this morning when Diamond Multimedia came to visit me. OK I did have to send the poor guy packing for an hour whilst I woke up and got my skates on. Still once he returned I'd drunk about four cans of Mountain Dew and I'd managed to get myself in order and in full pristine condition so that I could give you a sneak peak of Diamond's Banshee pre-alpha product. Why do I keep calling it Diamond's Banshee product? Because I'm under oath not to tell a soul what the name of it is until the product is officially announced soon. Neither can I comment on the pricing or the release date of the product(s) itself. But fear not because this time the NDA didn't grab my by the unmentionables and other than the product's name, price and bundle I'm basically going to tell you what's what. After all it's numbers you want and it's numbers you'll most certainly get. Since I was able to keep the board (which I've scanned for your added pleasure) for 24 hours I did some vigorous testing on both a Pentium II 400MHz with 128MB PC100 SDRAM and an AMD K6-2 300MHz just for good measure. I'll split up the article into two pieces because I've not yet finished all the testing yet and will do so by Wednesday.

Anyway here's what I can tell you, the board was a full monty AGP version of Diamond's Voodoo Banshee with 16MB of XXXXX RAM. I use Xs because the type of memory is under NDA unfortunately But since I'm allowed to say that the board was running at 'default' clock speed (also under NDA) I'll leave it to you readers to work out what type of memory was on the board. Remember I was told that it was running at the 'default' clock speed. It's pretty easy if you think about it- I mean Diamond did indeed say that the memory could be reliably overclocked and that they were going a good bit higher and that we could expect to see a 25% increase in performance once the board is clocked higher. So enough about the stuff I can't really say and on to the stuff that I can.