PowerColor Sniper 2

by William Henning
Editor, CPUReview
Copyright August 5, 1999
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

What is a TNT2 M64?

The TNT2 M64 is a 0.25 micron shrink of the original (highly successful) hot-running Riva TNT that uses a 64 bit memory interface. The TNT2 M64 can run at higher clock rate - 100Mhz on the Sniper 2 (with the SDRAM running at 110Mhz) - than the original TNT, and the core has been tweaked for better performance.

The most striking feature of the Sniper 2 is its low cost: <$100!

Ok, the free DVD player software and 32Mb of on-board SDRAM don't exactly hurt either.

As usual, I tried to get a good feel for the performance of the Sniper 2. I ran a number of popular benchmarks, whose results are reported later in this review. Please note, these are the same benchmarks I've been running for my other video card reviews, so you can compare the results shown in the different reviews on my site.

Unlike previous versions of the TNT2 drivers, I had no problems with the nVidia Detonator 2.08 drivers that I used for this review; AGP worked without any problems on my Super 7 test-bed.

System Description - Super 7

• Soyo 5EHM motherboard (MVP3, AGP, 1M cache, Super7)
• AMD K6-2 400 @ 400Mhz
• 64Mb 10ns SDRAM (Hyundai, 2x32Mb sticks)
• 6.4Gb Quantum ST hard drive
• PowerColor Sniper 2 Riva TNT2 M64 (AGP, 32Mb SDRAM)
• Windows 98 SE
• TNT2 reference driver v2.08
• DirectX 6.1

Benchmark Programs

• Turok demo
• Forsaken demo
• Incoming demo
• Final Reality benchmark

NEXT: Sniper 2 Features

Please sign the SMP petition! Click here to open the form in a new window.

Go to the home page for news!