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Don't worry, I'm not going to trawl on about how the flipping box looks. I mean it's a box OK? You know like, rectangular in shape and depth? Not particularly big but it does have a slight rustic feel to it if you must. Still with regard to the card itself, those of you that have seen pictures of an 12MB 3Dfx Voodoo2 reference design might as well have been looking at a Maxi Gamer 3D II. They are both one and the same thing and very much the same animal- only with different markings. The 3Dfx board has '3Dfx Interactive' on it and the Guillemot board has 'Guillemot Maxi Gamer 3D 2' inscribed on the circuit board instead. Clearly Guillemot has shied away from messing or tweaking with the reference design whatsoever. There has been no shuffling around or indeed any addition of a TV-Out either like Canopus' Pure 3D2. Their priority was to get a Voodoo2 board out as cheaply as they could.
Guillemot's use of 3Dfx's Voodoo2 chipset for the Guillemot Maxi Gamer 3D2 harbours what is known as a 4/4/4 configuration. In plain English this means that the board itself has one Pixelfx2 chip using 4MB of frame buffer memory and two Texelfx2 chips each using 4MB of texture memory. And without getting all anal about it- that equates to some 12MB and twenty four memory chips. The slap bang effect of a 4MB of frame buffer memory unit means that the old Voodoo Graphics ceiling of a 640x480 resolution can be swiped away. The Voodoo2 is able to go higher as well as just faster. Playing games at 800x600 or even 1024x768 (with two Voodoo2's in SLI mode) resolutions is essential these days and you'd expect nothing less. With the Guillemot Maxi Gamer 3D2, you can do just that.
Those of you familiar with graphics cards know exactly what's required when installing the card. So I do apologise. It's the same old story with the Maxi Gamer 3D 2's. It's a mere case of locating a PCI 2.1 compliant slot, popping in the card(s), whilst hooking up the monitor cable to the Maxi Gamer 3D II and then the pass through cable from the monitor to your existing 2D VGA card. A total synch. One point worth mentioning is that, if you're planning on plugging in two Maxi Gamer 3D2's for SLI, then make sure that you plug the pass through and monitor cables into your SECOND Voodoo2 board and NOT the first. Other than that SLI is automatically detected by Guillemot's set of drivers (both for Windows 95/98 and Windows NT) and can just as easily be disabled if need be. In fact, the drivers themselves allow for some tweaking and by clicking on the 'advanced' menu you'll be able to simply 'overclock' with the slider. So newcomers don't worry! It's as easy to lay a Maxi Gamer 3D2 in your PC, as it is to lay some hoochie on a Friday night 'pull' outside a trailer park. You won't even need to engage in too much 'foreplay' before getting into some real gaming action- with the Maxi Gamer 3D2's though.
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