Last week I gave the nVidia TNT based Spectra 2500 a going over on a fully charged Pentium II 400Mhz machine. Once again- the TNT is no Voodoo2 killer that nVidia had cranked it up to be but I noticed something else that bothered me- its performance on a lower spec machine. So I decided to test out the Spectra 2500 on a Pentium II 300MHz and on a socket 7 based AMD K6-2 300Mhz PC. Just as with the Pentium II 400Mhz, the results from the benchmarks didn't exactly instill me with any near enough confidence for me to recommend this card to you. I mean if you own a high-end PC (Pentium II 400MHz or above) then by all means go for a TNT if you already have a couple of Voodoo2s. But if you've got a slightly lower spec machine such as the Pentium II 3090Mhz or the AMD K6-2 300Mhz, then you'll see that the TNT makes no sense at all. The TNT is just far too CPU dependant and even a Pentium II 300Mhz, just doesn't quite give it enough horsepower. And because of this lack of horsepower, the TNT is not only overtaken by a Voodoo2 in most cases but by a Voodoo Banshee as well, which is some $50 cheaper and gives you accessibility to Glide based games. Sin became verge on being unplayable on a TNT with a K6-2 300Mhz- and that was only in single player mode.

Initially, I did try the Canopus drivers on the AMD K6-2 but found that they just didn't work and the PC couldn't even boot up. Then I used the new reference drivers that nVidia sent me and guess what? It was unstable as… just kidding! See I love nVidia really… Actually the board was now a lot more stable with the new drivers this time around and even though there were a few crashes here and there, it wasn't anything like the first time around. So thumbs up to nVidia for that. Thumbs up to Canopus as well for sending me an updated Bios, which also seemed to help. It just made the testing procedure that whole bit easier.