"We have a suggested clock speed for all our TNT2 chips. Thus you'll see boards come into our OEM partners at up to 150MHz (graphics clock speed) and 183Mhz (memory) speeds. Therefor it's at the discretion of our card vendors to decide what clock setting to opt for when selling their respective products. The theoretical maximum clock speed is of course higher and you'll see certain OEM partners taking advantage of this."… "

When questions arose during a conference call interview with 3dfx's Michael Howse, Vice President, Corporate & Business Development and Tony Tamasi, Product Manager, Graphics Hardware, we roped Brian Burke, PR Manager at STB Systems, Inc., into responding on behalf of 3dfx/STB:

Sharky Extreme: 3dfx/STB has seen the preview of the Viper V770 and expressed concerns about the board being a 'hot rod'. Can you explain why?

"EBWorld has pulled the presale of the Diamond Viper V770. There is probably a good reason for that.

At GDC, Nvidia was circulating a TNT2 product spec. that listed the core clock frequency as 150MHz.

We also draw our conclusions from nVidia's track record. The original TNT spec. was a 200 MHz memory clock and a 125MHz core graphics clock. (A data sheet, obtained from nVidia's website in April'98, states this specification). They then dropped the spec to 95MHz memory and 90MHz core graphics clock only days before shipment. I am sure you saw the "official" e-mail from Lew Pacely explaining that one. It is amazing to me how short peoples' memories are.

Then I read your preview that lists the specs as "XXX clock speed". What is with the secret? If they do two pixels per clock cycle, and they promise 350 million pixels-per second in their press release, that is a 175MHZ clock. This has also been confirmed by another TNT2 preview I have seen on the web. Why won't they just come out and publish the clock speed? Maybe it is because they know they have had issues in the past with over-stating clock speeds and it will be easier to lower the pixel-per-second than the clock speed when they don't hit their specs. If the boards are going to start shipping this month, as they say, they must know the clock speed by now?

In their official statement to you, they spec the part at 150Mhz and leave it to the vendors to choose the clock speed they ship at. Why would they set the clock speed so low, in effect asking their partners to take all the risk of warranting the parts, if they are so confident that it will run at higher clock speeds?"