Manufacturer: STB Tech: AGP based nVidia RIVA TNT board with 16Mb SDRAM and TV-out Bundle: Forsaken by Acclaim, 3D Screen Saver by Colorific, Web3D by Asymetrix, Software DVD Player and Digital Video Producer by Asymetrix Price: $199

STB has long been a company seeking to join the ranks of Creative Labs and Diamond Multimedia atop the sales volume pinnacle. Over the last few years, STB has risen steadily in both market share percentage and penetration (hey now) by offering performance-oriented products that don't break the buyer's piggy bank.

STB's newest 2D/3D card, the Velocity V4400, relies on the promise and potential of the freshly pressed nVidia Riva TNT chip. By now the TNT's troubled development cycle has become common knowledge to most, and consumers are anxious to find out how the chip actually performs. After the initial Canopus Spectra 2500 TNT review I performed a week or two ago, I wondered if the stellar performance figures were a result of Canopus' sharp engineers or whether the TNT was actually just one helluva good part.

Luckily for nVidia, the latter appears to be the truth. Much like most Voodoo2 cards on the market, the TNT seems to perform quite well regardless of whether it's mounted on a unique design (as with the Spectra) or if it's simply thrown onto a reference-based PCB.

Here's the black and white on the V4400 and its abilities:

· 16MB of 125MHz SDRAM (Clocked to 110MHz)
· AGP Texture Support (2X)
· OpenGL ICD
· 32bpp Rendering Support as well as Z-Buffer accuracy
· 250MHz RAMDAC
· Maximum 1920 x 1200 x 32 Win95/98 Desktop Resolution
· Up to 180 million pixels/second peak fill rates
· 6 million polygons per second peak processing
· 2.0 GB/second peak bandwidth
· 9 GFLOPS geometry processor
· 36 billion operations per/sec pixel pipeline
· Single-pass trilinear filtering
· Single-pass multi-texture processing