As a recent purchaser of a Creative Labs Banshee (I'll be sure to post when I receive it, what setup is like, image quality, games, etc.) I can tell you how I arrived at my purchase decision.
To me, none of the combo cards out there are satisfactory. I plan on buying a new video card 9-12 months from now because I expect another great technological leap in that time period (I hope some bright one finally gets the idea to put geometry acceleration on chip!) But my Number Nine 771 2MB card is getting pretty old, and I want some power behind my new 19 inch monitor (in addition to good 3D gaming capability), so a combo card is right for me. But I'm not going to spend $150-200 on a card I know I'm going to replace in a year.
HardwareStreet.com sells the Creative Labs Banshee for $105. With a $30 rebate that gives me ONE OF THE BEST (depending on how you view TNT vs. Banshee, but they both blow away the other competition) cards on the market, with 16MB RAM for a mere $75. That, my friends, is a GOLDMINE for someone like me, and I know I'm not one of a kind. :)
My next purchase will most likely be the Rampage. If a competitor manages to come out with a superior product earlier (and it proves to be reliablenVidia manages to
-G
P.S. Chip, please give Tom hell for that article. Be nice, be rational, and simply point out the nuances and inconsistencies in his review that cast a horrible bias against 3Dfx - after all, if he's really unbiased, shouldn't he care that his "objective" article makes every 3Dfx card on the market appear worthless when clearly they're very very close (if not superior) to TNT? |
