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The Voodoo Banshee's reference design wasn't quite as versatile as 3Dfx Interactive had originally hoped for. For example, the on-board TV-Out or DVD support were never made available as working parts to OEMs, making it difficult for them to distinguish one particular OEM's product from another. Hence the C3DFX3 EvilQueen, is much the same as any other Voodoo Banshee reference design in terms of its specs:
- 3Dfx Interactive Voodoo Banshee Chipset
- AGP Interface
- 16MB of 125MHz SGRAM
- 250MHz RAMDAC
- Maximum Win95/98 Desktop resolution of 1920x1200x24bpp
- AVI and MPEG-1 Video Playback Support
- Both PCI and AGP versions available
- 3D Features include Anti-Aliasing, Trilinear Filtering, Bump Mapping, and Sub-Pixel Correction Accuracy
- APIs Supported: Glide, D3D, OpenGL
We inspected the board a little more closely and found that corners and short cuts had not been taken. In fact, Power Color used slightly faster and more expensive SGRAM (with Block write support) as opposed to SDRAM. And the brand used is EliteMT, which is found on many of the other Voodoo Banshee's out there. So with 16MB of good quality SGRAM, everything seemed in order on the surface with the EvilQueen.
Far from being a 'brown paper bag' product, the 'EvilQueen' is actually testimony that Taiwanese companies are making an effort to become much more attractive in the retail sector. Although the reference design was untouched, Power Color opted to add an on board heat sync and fan combo (not the best quality we've ever seen). Not just any old fan, mind you. A bloody great huge fan! A fan so large you could rip it off and then use it to cool an older Pentium 200MX CPU! Ok, so we all understand that the Voodoo Banshee gets a little hot and that it has more than a 'few' transistors in its full die- but a three inch fan (many other Voodoo Banshee's ship with a heat sync only). And even though the Voodoo Banshee doesn't generate all that much heat, at least if you do ending up going for this board, you can be safe in the knowledge that the core won't ever be on the verge of a meltdown. One point worth mentioning, as impressively large as the fan is, we can't help thinking how shortsighted this might be for PCI users. Trying to fit a PCI card on either side of a PCI version of the C3DFX3 EvilQueen was seriously hindered due to the size of the protruding fan. Even though the C3DFX3 EvilQueen doesn't support AGP 2X (the same as any other Voodoo Banshee) you should really be looking to fill that AGP slot if you want to keep that onboard fan.
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