On to the third card in the roundup, and by the look of things, the further we go the better we get. Enter the Diamond Viper V770 Ultra. This is definitely the most eagerly anticipated Ultra TNT2 board on the entire roundup, because almost everyone expected this card to be a 175/200MHz true Ultra TNT2 unit. But this was not to be, because at the eleventh hour Diamond decided to play it safe with the defaults, a core speed of 150MHz and 183MHz for the memory. But don’t lose hope -we’re not through with this board just yet.
 

The list price of the Viper V770 Ultra is $249 but the average price of the board seems to be $210-215. The package comes with a healthy software and driver bundle.  The software consists of full versions of Superbike World Championship and Wild Metal Country, not forgetting a trial version of Need for Speed III. For DVD support, the package includes the mediocre Zoran SoftDVD player.

Perhaps most importantly, however, the Viper V770 Ultra also comes with Diamond InControl Tools 99, a very easy to use utility that gives the user greater control over the desktop than the average display utilities. 

As usual, after the easy driver installation process the display properties are upgraded with Diamond display properties. The 3D section features Direct3D and OpenGL tweaking, but apart from that Diamond has also included an overclocking utility by via a drop down menu called 3D Turbo Gauge. This is a big change over the typical sliders that normally overclock graphics cards. This utility includes 5 preset settings with the speed shown in a speedometer style preview box, and the final 5th booster level overclocks the Viper to 175/200MHz. Quite a nice change from the everyday overclocking thingy. 
But that’s not all -I have one more thing to point out. Every time you load a program, a separate profile is made for the program. For example, running Quake III makes a profile called QUAKE3 and running Xing MPEG player gives you a profile called XMPLAYER. These profiles let you customize the Viper V770 individually for each of these programs. So for example, say I edit the settings under the QUAKE3 profile 
to get more brightness and push the overclocking utility to the 5th position booster level for more performance. And then I can just leave the XMPLAYER profile as it is, because I don’t want anything to be changed for Xing. Is this great or what? Quite simply, you can tweak & tailor the Viper individually for each program, so that you don’t have to mess around every time you’re using different programs. 

All this good news making you feel nauseous? Wanna hear something negative about this card? Try this on for size- the card doesn’t have a TV-out. Too bad. If it did, it would have been a complete graphics card, but Diamond has left this feature out to minimize the cost of this unit. Besides, they’re also aiming this card mostly at the high-end gaming community. The PCB of the Viper looks very neat just like the Creative 3D Blaster TNT2 Ultra. The Viper’s PCB is a good one inch longer than the other cards, plus it also features the same type of 32MB 5.5ns EliteMT SDRAM. But sadly the active cooling unit found on the Viper V770 Ultra is a very sorry sight, just like the cooler on the Creative 3D Blaster TNT2 Ultra. The heatsink is very thin and the majority of real estate is taken up by the cooler. What’s more, this thing is glued solid to the Ultra TNT2 chip. Of course, I did manage to melt the glue and remove the cooler but that’s not recommended, because by doing so you may void the warranty of the board. So unless you’re a very experienced overclocker, don’t try that part. As for the 175/200MHz setting, well, I am happy to say that it was 99% stable, with just the one crash during Need for Speed: High Stakes. At 183/210MHz, the card’s stability was about 90%. It’s too bad, because if the unit had a better cooling device it would have been stable up to 183/210MHz.  

The drivers of the Viper V770 Ultra were very stable and I didn’t notice any problems with visuals during gameplay at all. The card also provides slightly better desktop image quality than the other TNT2 Ultra cards. But again, at 1600x1200 sharpness and image quality is not as good as the Matrox G400 Max cards... well, what can I say, typical nVidia Riva TNT2 2D performance. As for video playback- well, it was good. DVD playback was smooth and the quality of video was very good. Well, whaddaya know, I’ve said just about everything I have to say about the Viper V770... Oh wait, just forgot about performance. Well, the Viper V770 and the Creative 3D Blaster TNT2 Ultra almost performed side by side in the 3D benchmarks, but once the nVidia 1.88 reference drivers were installed we did see a noticeable improvement in framerates.

 
Generally, the Viper V770 is slightly above average in performance when compared to the other cards. Note that this card’s performance is somewhat dependent on your CPU- you’ll need a good one (say, Pentium II 450 or above) to squeeze all the power out of it. Below that, you’ll still get performance, but you may not see a distinct difference in performance between TNT2 and Ultra TNT2. As for 2D, the performance is very much average though the desktop picture quality at 1024x768 at 32-bit color was slightly better than the rest of the TNT2 cards found on this roundup.