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Though the Phoenix comes in two flavors, the logic of a PCI version somewhat escapes me. It beats me why anyone with an AGP slot would opt for the PCI version but for those of you that have something else plugged in your AGP slots. I don't know? Maybe you've got one of those free ATI Rage Pro 2x's that you get with any new PC these days? Maybe it's been jammed in so tightly that you can't force it out? Of course, if you don't have an AGP slot then you don't have a Pentium II, neither do you have a Super Socket 7 based PC, which means that you're not really going to have enough 'oomph' to kick-start the Voodoo Banshee. This is because the architecture is very similar to the Voodoo2, which doesn't scale to well on low-end Pentium 200MMXs and below. Of course you could still use it as a 2D card at its cheap price. And with little (if any?) price differential, I would always go for an AGP based Voodoo Banshee over a PCI version.
Even though the Voodoo Banshee doesn't support AGP 2X and only PCI 66MHz and/or AGP 1X with side band support I did still get a minimal increase in performance with the AGP Voodoo Banshee as mentioned earlier. But obviously with an AGP slot having faster BUS transfer rates an AGP based Voodoo Banshee will gain a little bit in comparison to a PCI version's 33MHz bus speed. Although having said that, when going for the AGP version, don't expect miracles. The Voodoo Banshee's architecture is designed in tandem with the Voodoo2 core and thus optimized for texturing out of local memory. Local texturing will of course be faster with the AGP version once your game maxes out the on board memory and starts texture paging.
Remember folks if you've already got a Voodoo2 or two then you can still hook up a Voodoo Banshee based Maxi Gamer Phoenix but your only advantage will be that you'll have a really great 2D card that can cope with high resolutions such as 1600x1200 in 32-bit. This is of course useful for those that have really snazzy monitors. Other than that if you still play Duke Nukem 3D then buying a Maxi Gamer Phoenix will enable you to play at lighting quick speeds (last time I played it on a P166 18 months ago it was fast enough thanks). Some food for thought- if you've already got a Voodoo2 or two, then it might be more interesting to go for a Matrox G200 based 2D/3D card with its full AGP 2X support, higher rendering capabilities and more polished image quality. If however you've not yet jumped on to the 3Dfx bandwagon and are looking to sample Glide based games, play some Quake2 and or have a superb but cheap D3D accelerator then by all means go for the Voodoo Banshee. I would also recommend the Phoenix over the TNT if you've got a low/mid-range system as the TNT scales poorly with slower CPUs. The TNT does indeed outperform the Phoenix but I did have the TNT based board clocked at 100MHz during testing. Where the TNT really outperforms the Phoenix is on higher-end systems like a Pentium II 400MHz.
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