Well, well... Guillemot’s turn in the hot seat. First of all, these guys weren’t exactly known as a Riva TNT card builder because they were very busy with their Voodoo2 cards in the past. And yes, they did make some great Voodoo2 cards. However, like all the other 3dfx customers Guillemot was left with no choice but to build cards based on the nVidia Riva TNT2 chipset for their high-end cards. Much to our delight, they also built a card based on the Ultra TNT2 chipset, the Guillemot Maxi Gamer Xentor 32.
 

To make things rough for their competitors, Guillemot is offering the Xentor 32 with a $30 mail-in rebate for direct sales through their website. This brings down the list price of $229 to $199 making the board one of the cheapest in this roundup. What’s more, this board is one of two cards in the market to feature a 175MHz TNT2 core, putting it directly into the upper echelons in terms of performance. However, the memory clock is set at the default level of 183MHz.

It seems that all the manufacturers who chose the default TNT2 clock speed are using EliteMT 5.5ns SDRAM, and that’s exactly what we have here with the Xentor 32. And don’t forget, the Xentor also offers a TV-out powered by the same old Brooktree 869 video controller. But the biggest puzzle for me was seeing a AGP2x sticker on the Xentor box. No, it wasn’t a mistake. (More’s the pity) Check out the specs of the board on their website, it states ”AGP 2x interface with full texture transfer support, the entire on-board RAM can be dedicated to the frame buffer“. Bollocks, I say. Why in the world did Guillemot design this thing to be AGP 2x? This is a big downer for the Xentor 32 because it’s going to miss out on the performance increase that will be offered by AGP 4x motherboards once they arrive. 

Now the package: to start off, the Xentor comes with a good software bundle, just like the Diamond Viper V770 Ultra. You get two game demos- Speed Busters: American Highways and Kingpin: Life of Crime. 
The Xing DVD player is also included in the kit, a much better player than the Zoran SoftDVD player is shipped with the Diamond unit. The driver installation is fairly easy and can be carried out without any problems if you stick to the basics. While installing the drivers, the DirectX Media Runtime drivers are also installed as with the Diamond Viper V770 Ultra. Documentation provided with the board is pretty decent too. 
 

The Xentor 32’s PCB is very similar to the Creative 3D Blaster TNT2 Ultra in size and layout, though the Xentor’s active cooling unit has a slightly better heatsink. Well, I suppose Guillemot didn’t want take any chances with a smaller unit since the TNT2 core is set to 175MHz. And yes, of course the board is 100% stable at 175/183MHz, the factory default. At 183/210MHz, the board was slightly more stable than the other units with a 150/183 configuration but still it wasn’t 100% stable. Close to 92%, because Quake II and Shogo started hanging up on me.  So though it has a slightly better cooling device than the Creative and the Diamond boards, it didn’t stick to 183/210MHz without lockups.

To make things worse, unlike Creative, Diamond and Hercules, Guillemot isn’t offering built-in overclocking support for the Xentor 32. So you’ll have to get a third party utility such as PowerStrip 2.5 for overclocking. 

Performance-wise, the Xentor definitely came in second place in the overall standings with it’s factory default 175/183MHz settings. Even in 2D performance, the board held a clear margin. Except for a minor lighting problem with Kingpin at 1024x768, the drivers were perfect. But the problem did go away when I installed the nVidia v1.88 reference driver. Picture quality is your everyday TNT2 at 2D and 3D, nothing out of the ordinary. But unlike the other cards with TV-out, the Xentor had noticeably better image quality. Especially at 800x600, the games were much sharper than the other cards.
And now, on to the final competitor in our roundup…