We have all heard the wonderful things said about the Nvidia TNT2 chipset equipped line of video cards.  They are fast with great 3D capabilities and excellent visual quality.  You run down to the local computer store with a bit of excitement cause your Voodoo 2 is now dated and your ready to jump into the next level of 3D graphics.  You get to the row of neatly stacked up boxes and then POW!  It hits you hard at $200 or more.

Talk about a deal...

  Well guess what folks, with a little searching around there are some great deals out there from vendors who carry OEM products.   First let me warn you of a few things.  OEM or the "un-boxed" version of computer hardware is not supported by the manufacturer though sometimes you might get some type of short-term limited coverage by the vendor.  OEM hardware does not come with all the extra software thats usually found with boxed versions.  OEM sometimes is missing a few "extra" features that come with the boxed version.   Now if your like me then you wont miss the extra software (usually games, I got my own thanks) or the extra hardware features (like T.V. out) that the Viper 770 boxed version may come with.  I just got a couple of OEM Viper 770 video cards for less then $150.  Now they are not the Ultra versions but great deals just the same.   Dont go emailing me and asking where I got em cause you can do your own leg work on the various price comparison sites to find your own deals.

Missing one important thing...

  The one thing that TNT2 cards do besides give you great graphics is that they run real hot.  The OEM Viper 770s come with a really nice 1 3/4" square heatsink mounted on the TNT2 chipset but they are missing the now common cooling fan.  No problem I say, I dumped a couple boxes of spare parts that I had up on a shelf and I quickly produced a couple of 50mm x 10mm Vantec cooling fans left over from heatsink experiments.  These particular fans I have are of the four-pin connector variety which is good since the OEM Viper 770 does not have the 12 volt fan header found on the boxed version of the card and they move more air then the common 40mm socket 7 fans adapted by some folks for their video cards.  If you are so inclined I have no doubt that with minimum soldering skills a header could be added to the card which has the appropriate location clearly marked.  The Vantec fan screwed right onto the OEM Viper 770's heatsink and the modification took about a full minute.

  I tried the OEM Viper 770 with just the stock heatsink first to get a baseline on performance and capabilities before I added the fan.  I ran a few rounds of Quake 3 Arena test demo at 800x600 for some fps numbers at different core and memory settings and I recorded some temperature data. then did the same after installing the fan.  I ran all the tests with a PIII 450 @ 450MHz on a SOYO 6BA+III motherboard and 256mb of RAM.

Thats what I call a deal.

All trademarks used are properties of their respective owners.   All rights reserved.
Copyright © 1999 by John Bogush