Price: $250 ESP

Back in February of 1998, Creative was deemed somewhat of a 'darkhorse' in the Graphics board business. How times have changed. Ever since they beat Diamond to the punch in February of 1998 and released the Creative 3D Blaster Voodoo2 (a full four weeks before Diamond), they've excelled at showing up on store shelves before the competition . They were first to market with the Voodoo Banshee, the TNT, the TNT2 and once again Creative is first to market with their version of NVIDIA's GeForce 256, the 3D Blaster Annihilator.

The other ace up their sleeve at retail has been their competitive pricing. Creative's boards have consistently been less expensive at retail than their Diamond, Guillemot, or ELSA counterparts. The Creative Annihilator is no different. It was the first GeForce 256 to market (in Singapore, quite a bit earlier than any other card) and it's also very competitively priced.

The .22 micron NV10 chip (with its 23 million transistors) r is the third NVIDA chip that Creative has opted for. Creative's motif has usually been to follow the bog-standard reference design. With the Annihilator, the company has indeed gone the way of NVIDIA's reference design. Unlike other GeForce boards, the Annihilator does not have any TV-Out (boohoo) chip. The memory on the board sports the same eight chips on the front and eight on the back as found on the TNT2 Ultra. The memory used was the ESMT 5ns type, which was set to a 166MHz-default speed also previously found on TNT2 Ultras. The memory is designed to run solidly at 183MHz and indeed up to 200MHz (with a bit of luck). Creative includes a neat overclocking slider to allow you to go up to 183Mhz. If you want to take your chances and go higher then head over to our 'unofficial guide to overlocking the GeForce 256' (using the NVIDIA reference drivers mind you).