Manufacturer: Diamond Multimedia Tech: PCI based Voodoo2 board with 8Mb 25ns EDO DRAM Bundle: Full optmised version of Heavy Gear, Star Wars Special Edition Games Pack, EIDOS Sampler CD with Tomb Raider II demo, EA Sampler CD and Diamond Monster Driver CD. Price: $249 w/ 8Mb - $299 w/ 12Mb

A full 18 months have been and gone and what a joy they were if you lived hand-in-hand in the land of Voodoo Graphics. I mean those kited out with a 3Dfx based Voodoo Graphics 3D card enjoyed the fruits of GLQuake, then Glide versions of Tomb Raider, Turok et. al. Reminiscing is so rosy isn't it? However, it's all so different now, what with technology moving at such a fast rate- and you don't even need to have read HG Wells to have figured that one out either. The thing is though, that today's games such as, Quake2, Incoming, Redline Racer, Battlezone, Barrage and Forsaken are even more full of eye candy than ever before. So much so, that it would make an elephant full-of beans, farting thunder and crapping lighting, seem as though it was making a mountain out of a molehill (if you catch the whiff?). So remove that picture (not the Elephant taking a dump but the Voodoo Graphics one I made earlier) because here it comes- your 18month old trusty Voodoo Graphics isn't the same power tool it once was. Nope, not if you want to frag the life out of anyone in Quake2, it's just that times have changed. And as a gamer, if you've just forked out for a fancy pants Pentium II based PC with all the trimmings, you really want to be able to push your beast as hard and fast as possible right? To do just that, you're going to need the beauty and the beast within a Voodoo2 chipset.

Voodoo Graphics just isn't the leader of the pack anymore. Neither is any other chipset when in comparison to the Voodoo2. In fact, the Voodoo2 chipset is streets ahead and totally obliterates any '3D wannabe' cards so take this review with a pinch of salt because the review itself isn't a review of one chipset against another. Otherwise I could just say that Voodoo2 pisses all-over everything else right now. Nothing else can keep pace with it (at least for the moment).