Product: STB Velocity 4400 AGP
Company: STB
Estimated Street Price: $130
Chipset: NVIDIA RIVA TNT
Review By: Matt Klosterman

Introduction

Since the days of the RIVA 128 STB has been one of NVIDIA's main customers. Fueled by their strong retail and OEM presence, STB has continued this trend with the release of their RIVA TNT based Velocity 4400. Unfortunately, 3Dfx's recent acquisition of STB means that we won't see any STB products based on future NVIDIA chipsets.

Software Bundle

• NFL Blitz (Full Version)
• Asymetrix Digital Video Producer (Special Edition)
• Asymetrix Web3D (Special Edition)
• 3Deep

Installation

Installing the Velocity 4400 was quite simple. The only areas where someone might have problems is setting the video driver to Standard VGA before installation, and setting the BIOS correctly.

Direct3D Performance

Test settings and conditions are shown at the end of the review

3DMark 99

 

Pentium 166 MMX	Pentium II 266	Pentium II 300	Pentium II 333	Pentium II 400	Pentium II 448
1425	1724	1828	1894	2022	2115

 

Forsaken

 

	Pentium II 266	Pentium II 300	Pentium II 333	Pentium II 400	Pentium II 448
640x480	133.15	115.49	124.74	141.7	159.02
800x600	98.54	108.31	111.61	117.17	120.08
1024x768	73.12	73.47	73.21	73.67	73.93

There's not much to say about the Forsaken scores, as you would expect the scores are very high in every resolution and on every processor. However, the Pentium II 266 score is a little odd.

 

Incoming

 

16-bit
	Pentium 166 MMX	Pentium II 266	Pentium II 300	Pentium II 333	Pentium II 400	Pentium II 448
640x480	28.47	56.7	64.31	71.35	84.18	95.21
800x600	29.3	58.1	64.92	69.07	72.89	73.51
1024x768	30	46.32	46.68	46.77	46.81	47.14

 

32-bit
	Pentium 166 MMX	Pentium II 266	Pentium II 300	Pentium II 333	Pentium II 400	Pentium II 448
640x480	28.29	58.63	62.51	64.93	65.3	65.8
800x600	29.17	43.05	43.42	43.45	43.48	43.79
1024x768	25.37	23.52	26.11	26.12	26.11	26.27

As you can see the TNT takes a huge hit when going from 16bpp to 32bpp. I'll cover the 32bpp issue in more depth later in the review.

 

Turok

	Pentium 166 MMX	Pentium II 266	Pentium II 300	Pentium II 333	Pentium II 400	Pentium II 448
640x480	52.6	81.3	105.8	104.7	137.6	154.1
800x600	52.5	76.1	91.5	85	101.8	104.8

OpenGL Performance

32-bit Performance

Conclusion

Pros:

• Great performance
• Good price
• TV-Out
• Decent software bundle

Cons:

• No DVD support (Out Of The Box-Download add-on likely in the future)
• Large performance hit when using 32-bit color
• Runs very hot, an active cooling system such as a fan in addition to the heatsink would have been preferable.

The Velocity 4400 is by far the best 2D/3D card I've had the opportunity to use so far. While not perfect, the card shows great balance and has a reasonable price. However, if you need hardware DVD decoding you may want to consider the ATI Rage128 based cards, which seem to have very good performance.

Test Conditions

All tests have been performed on Windows 98, with DirectX 6 installed unless otherwise noted. The tests are performed three times each, then averaged together.

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