Available: Now

In this day and age, the big guns in the realm of 3D accelerators are the likes of the GeForce 256, and ATI Rage MAXX but there's still plenty of other high-quality chipsets around, including the former resident of the high-performance throne, the TNT 2 Ultra. While this chipset has served it's time as king of the hill it's still a very viable solution for gamers looking for a spicy video board that isn't quite as pricey as a GeForce DDR.

Absolute Multimedia's TNT 2 Ultra, dubbed "Outrageous 3D Graphics Ultra" isn't a new product on the market but is a fine example of what a former champion can accomplish. The board they're offering is priced at $179, which is about $100 less than what their GeForce DDR goes for (see review here), and for that sum you get a board with the TNT 2 chip clocked at the standard "Ultra" speed of 150MHz and 32Mb of SGRAM running at 183MHz. In addition to this, the board includes TV-out capabilities via S-video and a special cord that will let you hook it up to a standard composite TV input if you're lacking an S-video input on your TV set. For all you Flat Panel freaks out there, you'll also find an LCD connector on the board's back plate.

Besides the board and the accompanying cord the box is filled with a collection of CDs containing some odd goodies, most of which areaging OEM versions of popular games (Half-Life: Day One, Descent 3: Sol ascent) but also the full version of Heretic II. There's also a free Software Choice title included (you can read more about Software Choice here)

We'll assume that most of you are pretty familiar with the TNT 2's capabilities by now so we'll just repeat a few of the "important" ones here.

• 32 MB SGRAM
• 128bit Data transfer bandwidth
• 350MHz RAMDAC
• AGP 4x/2x/1x with fast writes
• S-Video TV-Out
• LCD FlatPanel Out
• Peak fill rate of 300 million bilinear filtered, multi-textured pixels
• Up to 8 million triangles per second

• DVD sub-picture alpha blending
• 5-tap horizontal and 3-tap vertical video filtering