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Web Developer's Journal Archive SectionThis article is out of date, but may still be useful to some readers.Imagine 128Blazing Video Performanceby Bruce Morris |
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If you're not willing to pay a high end price for high end performance this review is not for you. Number Nine's Imagine 128 is simply the fastest video card made and is aimed squarely at the user that demands the very fast performance and is willing to pay for it.
Assuming you already have a fast CPU - a 486 DX2-66 or a Pentium - your bottleneck to achieving speedy performance is RAM and a fast video card. For the most part, RAM is RAM - go buy as much as you can afford. Video cards however, differ greatly. In the ever-changing video card market Number 9's Imagine 128 not only stands out from the crowd - it's not even in the crowd. At this time the Imagine 128 basically has no competition. Nobody else is making a 128 bit card and bandwidth is where it's at in the video performance arena. Bandwidth isn't the only issue, of course. The board needs to be engineered properly. I've noticed several video card shootouts in some of the popular computer magazines that award the number one spot to Diamond's Stealth or another card without mentioning the Imagine 128. I suppose they feel they should be comparing 64 bit apples with 64 bit apples and shouldn't compare a 128 bit orange in the same comparative review. Maybe so but they are misleading people into thinking that the 64 bit cards reviewed are the hottest available. Number 9 has made a great leap of assumptions with the Imagine 128. They assumed leadership in the high end video card market by not only effectively doubling bandwidth but by blowing off the idea of standard video DRAM and using amazingly fast VRAM. They are aiming only at the high end market and assume the high end market doesn't want to make compromises. they assume the high end market is willing to pay a premium for high end performance. They assume high end users are using PCI - Number Nine manufacturers for PCI bus only - no VL, no ISA. I believe they assume correctly. The Imagine 128 we reviewed came with 4 MB of VRAM. With 4 MB it is capable of 60 MHz with 65K colors at 1600 x 1200, 80 MHz with 65K colors at 1280 x 1024, 100 MHz with 16.8 million colors at 1152 x 864, 1024 x 768, 800 x 600, and 640 x 480. This makes for a creamy smooth, amazingly detailed screen resolution. Believe me, it is hard to go back once you have experienced the beautiful smooth resolution of the Imagine 128 with truly fast performance. Running at the highest possible resolution with 16.8 million colors dropped our free resources down by about 5 to 6% but it is worth it. According to Number Nine the Imagine 128 WinBench 4.0 benchmarks run on a Dell XPS P90, with 16 MB RAM and 256Kb cache are 50.3 at 1024 x 768 x 8, 46.6 at 1024 x 768 x 16, 47.8 at 1152 x 768 x 16, and 36.9 at 1024 x 768 x 16 x 32. The 128s are designed to work especially well with Pentiums and can directly support 8, 16, and 32 bpp display buffers. Dell XPS P90 Dimension systems are shipping with Imagine 128 as the standard video card. For the real 32 bit speed freaks it comes with Windows NT 3.5 drivers - something few video cards come with. Since even most Pentium systems will run behind the 128 is all this speed and power overkill? What is the value of this potential power? Few systems today can keep the 128 busy. Remember, we're talking high end here. We stated at the beginning of the review that this is for people ready for the bleeding edge. The video card has traditionally been the bottleneck in fast computers. Some part of the computer is always going to be the bottleneck so should you not buy a fast video card because it will spend time waiting for the rest of the system? That's not a logical approach. I hear some speed freaks saying that it's time to start buying 60ns SIMM chips instead of the usual 70ns SIMMs. With some multiprocessor systems 70ns RAM may be the bottleneck but that's not going to stop me from buying a 4 processor Pentium. I want to know that I have done everything I can to buy only the very fastest components available. My time is worth money - a lot of money to me and I'm always going to try to determine where the speed bottleneck is in my system and upgrade it. When we review a video card we are usually replacing it in a computer that already has a quite adequate and speedy board. Usually we have to run benchmarks to demonstrate a speed difference. Even when we popped in the particularly nice Kelvin 64 we had to look sharp to see a speed difference with the naked eye. Most high end computer systems ship these days with a pretty fast video card to start with. The Imagine 128 blew this kind of thinking away with a whoosh. The speed difference was immediately noticeable. There was simply no doubt that we had plugged a speed demon into our test system. To say the Imagine 128 is "snappy" is like saying an Indy 500 race car is "snappy". The 128 is blink of an eye fast. If you have to have the best because you realize that your time=$, then you also realize that $900 for the Imagine 128 is not too much to pay. It's actually an economical purchase to make. I suppose we shouldn't fault reviewers for not including the 128 in comparative video card reviews. It's simply not comparable to other video cards. Not only is it not in the same price range it's not in the same speed range. You can't compare a Taurus to a Lotus. The 128 is the Lotus of video cards. |
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