Rating: 
Summary: CRAZY DRIVERS! But awesome graphics and color!
Review: I went from a Voodoo3 2000 to the Viper and I must say the graphics are 100% faster, clearer, sharper, and the colors are awesome! If you are a Quake 3 fan, the game gets redefined for the better! However, there seems to be all kind of drivers issue with this card! Bios flashing, upgraded drivers all the time, ect! Transform & Lighting feature not even available yet due to drivers delayed by Diamond. Also, do your reseach and make sure your motherboard can handle the card. Like I said, it's real buggy. If you are ready for awesome graphics at half the price of a DDR/SDR card and are willing to constantly fight with the drivers issue, then I recommend it, but if you just want to slap it on and play, stick to Voodoo.
Rating: 
Summary: STAY AWAY, pay attention to the customer reviews!
Review: I've had a diamond stealth G460 with 8 mb for two years. Then, I finally thought it was about time to get a "SUPER" video card, even thought my favourite games(USAF, Delta Force 2) would run in my old video card.When I saw the Viper 2, I simply couldn't resist... So much features and special gimmicks such as "T&L", "Quad texture", etc... I just thought that if I could play my games decently with my old video card, if I got this new Viper 2, the performance would be outstanding. The Viper 2 would totally blow away my old video card and give me fantastic video quality and frame rates in my games. Well, if things had only been this way... After I installed the card with the driver that came with it, I just went to Delta Force 2 and could notice no special improvements in video quality or frame rates. Don't get me wrong. I've had a monster 2 in the past, and once you turned the thing on, all your games would seem totally changed. They would seem different, better. The frame rates would raise and you COULD notice it! After the initial disappointment I went to the diamond website( now S3), and started downloading and instaling the new drivers. I've tested them all, microsoft supported or unsupported versions, and I must say this is a major headache. When a driver improves a certain aspect, it simply screws another... :( When I had finally upgraded and reinstalled the latest versions of Directx (7.0a), and the latest microsoft unsupported driver from diamond, things would still not seem much better. I mean, I would turn my games on and you simply couldn't notice I had upgraded from a two-year old 8 mb card to a brand new 32 mb video card with a hot chip. And this is bad! :( I mean, I expected a noticeable improvement in frame rates or 3D video quality. And it didn't happened. And the worst part, my Cuseeme videoconference software who had been working flawlessly for a long time, started to freeze the whole computer every time I would open a vid. Then I'm back to the original driver that came with the card, so Cuseeme can work, but I have no special performance in my games. I've had read plenty of reviews warning people about bad drivers for the Viper II, but I decided to ignore them and take my chances buying a "GREAT" card for a decent price. Now I just wish I had believed the bad reviews and bought a TNT2 Ultra or Voodoo chipset card instead. If you are thinking about buying this card, think twice! Unless Diamond treats its customers seriously and release a final driver for the Viper 2 which finally works perfectly, I'm just thinking about never ever again buying anyhthing from them. It's horrible to have great expectations and spend quite a sum of money in a video card. Then, not only I am very disappointed with the performance, but now I also have lots of video bugs and problems I didn't have before. I have almost the same performance I had with my 8 mb card and now I have all sorts of headaches because of testing and installing drivers, I'm angry and I'm poorer. :(
Rating:
Summary: STAY AWAY, pay attention to the customer reviews!
Review: I've had a diamond stealth G460 with 8 mb for two years. Then, I finally thought it was about time to get a "SUPER" video card, even thought my favourite games(USAF, Delta Force 2) would run in my old video card. When I saw the Viper 2, I simply couldn't resist... So much features and special gimmicks such as "T&L", "Quad texture", etc... I just thought that if I could play my games decently with my old video card, if I got this new Viper 2, the performance would be outstanding. The Viper 2 would totally blow away my old video card and give me fantastic video quality and frame rates in my games. Well, if things had only been this way... After I installed the card with the driver that came with it, I just went to Delta Force 2 and could notice no special improvements in video quality or frame rates. Don't get me wrong. I've had a monster 2 in the past, and once you turned the thing on, all your games would seem totally changed. They would seem different, better. The frame rates would raise and you COULD notice it! After the initial disappointment I went to the diamond website( now S3), and started downloading and instaling the new drivers. I've tested them all, microsoft supported or unsupported versions, and I must say this is a major headache. When a driver improves a certain aspect, it simply screws another... :( When I had finally upgraded and reinstalled the latest versions of Directx (7.0a), and the latest microsoft unsupported driver from diamond, things would still not seem much better. I mean, I would turn my games on and you simply couldn't notice I had upgraded from a two-year old 8 mb card to a brand new 32 mb video card with a hot chip. And this is bad! :( I mean, I expected a noticeable improvement in frame rates or 3D video quality. And it didn't happened. And the worst part, my Cuseeme videoconference software who had been working flawlessly for a long time, started to freeze the whole computer every time I would open a vid. Then I'm back to the original driver that came with the card, so Cuseeme can work, but I have no special performance in my games. I've had read plenty of reviews warning people about bad drivers for the Viper II, but I decided to ignore them and take my chances buying a "GREAT" card for a decent price. Now I just wish I had believed the bad reviews and bought a TNT2 Ultra or Voodoo chipset card instead. If you are thinking about buying this card, think twice! Unless Diamond treats its customers seriously and release a final driver for the Viper 2 which finally works perfectly, I'm just thinking about never ever again buying anyhthing from them. It's horrible to have great expectations and spend quite a sum of money in a video card. Then, not only I am very disappointed with the performance, but now I also have lots of video bugs and problems I didn't have before. I have almost the same performance I had with my 8 mb card and now I have all sorts of headaches because of testing and installing drivers, I'm angry and I'm poorer. :(
Rating: 
Summary: Very good card, IF you know what you're doing!
Review: I've had the Viper2 for 2 months now and can say that I'm very happy with it's performance. I'm using it on an AMD 750 system with a Soyo K7VIA m.b., running Win98 (not SE). The colors and images are sharp and crisp, and game fps are outstanding esp. in Half-life, Unreal and Unreal Tournament (get the MeTaL drivers for UT!!). Occasional tearing on some Half-life decals, but nothing bad and I am overclocking. I installed this card on a brand new system, so it was a "clean" install, and the latest drivers (5/19/00) from the diamond website work flawlessly with DX7.0a. AGP cards are serious performance devices, thus, they will not work perfectly by just plugging them in to your old system without changing various system settings! In particular, AGP-aperture size, BIOS caching, IRQ settings, etc. Seems a lot of people complain that "the drivers are bad" w/o really explaining how it is they know that the drivers are bad. Lot's of software out there will not work properly if new hardware is installed underneath it. Clean installs are a must. People put new drivers on and something changes here and another thing there and they assume it's the driver's fault. Now, Diamond used to have a web page detailing what settings to change in your BIOS for troubleshooting, and I can't find it anymore, so that is a mark against them. But their customer support telephone people know all about it. In summary, the product is good, the drivers are FINE, and if you know what you're doing then this is a GREAT card for the money.
Rating:
Summary: Very good card, IF you know what you're doing!
Review: I've had the Viper2 for 2 months now and can say that I'm very happy with it's performance. I'm using it on an AMD 750 system with a Soyo K7VIA m.b., running Win98 (not SE). The colors and images are sharp and crisp, and game fps are outstanding esp. in Half-life, Unreal and Unreal Tournament (get the MeTaL drivers for UT!!). Occasional tearing on some Half-life decals, but nothing bad and I am overclocking. I installed this card on a brand new system, so it was a "clean" install, and the latest drivers (5/19/00) from the diamond website work flawlessly with DX7.0a. AGP cards are serious performance devices, thus, they will not work perfectly by just plugging them in to your old system without changing various system settings! In particular, AGP-aperture size, BIOS caching, IRQ settings, etc. Seems a lot of people complain that "the drivers are bad" w/o really explaining how it is they know that the drivers are bad. Lot's of software out there will not work properly if new hardware is installed underneath it. Clean installs are a must. People put new drivers on and something changes here and another thing there and they assume it's the driver's fault. Now, Diamond used to have a web page detailing what settings to change in your BIOS for troubleshooting, and I can't find it anymore, so that is a mark against them. But their customer support telephone people know all about it. In summary, the product is good, the drivers are FINE, and if you know what you're doing then this is a GREAT card for the money.
Rating:
Summary: The worst product I have ever bought
Review: This is the worst product I have ever owned. It sounds all neat and cool when you look at the box and see "Who said anything about playing fair", Diamond is right, they don't play fair. Their tech support is the worst I have ever dealt with. I never got my computer to work when the video card was in. Also, here is not playing fair for you- Diamond (S3) switched to the name sonicblue and now doesn't provide the tech support that they say they do on the box. It took me six months to finaly get them to send me a new card and that didn't even work. I never knew that there could be so many problems with a video card. They ask you to change a million things when you call tech support. I will never buy anything from diamond again. Also, on top of the card not working, I now don't have any money to buy a new card. I have invested in a DVD drive which now can't run and I am running all of my high graphics games with software rendering and a 1MB video card. I repeat: DO NOT GET THIS CARD!!!!!!
Rating:
Summary: Viper II a Great Card.
Review: Well, I buy this card six month ago and it works very well for the pourpose that i had purchased it. First of all i was looking for a card with great OPGL performance. The VII OPGL is very good. Sencond, I need that the card has a very good DVD quality, because i had a Pionner DVD-Rom and I didn`t want to put another card in my system. The VII DVD quality is very good too. And of course I need a card that offers me TV Out. The VII has it too, a S-VHS output and a Composite Video output. And the last point to choose this card was the games, it works fine in D3D (the OPGL is better!), and there are only a few games that doesn`t work, because the latest drivers (9.51.11 and 9.51.12)and the Bios upgrade has fixed a lot of bugs. Also, I had the card overcloked with S3Teak, It wokrs very well I suggest to put a cooler If you think to do overclocking. The technical support is very good, and there are Web Pages and forums about the VII that could help you too. It is a great card, It offer very good performance in all terrain! This card helps me to save a lot of money because it can make the job of other cards. (2D, 3D OPGL, D3D Games, DVD card decoder, TV out S-VHS and Composite Video (the tv-out works in everything, from DVD to Games to Windows Desktop application), and AGPX4 and 32MB. And think, what could you buy for that price!!!
Rating:
Summary: Beware legacy products
Review: You know what legacy products are, right? Those are computer peripherals or other hardware which aren't quite the same as similar products mentioned in the newest reviews. These other products get left behind when the manufacturer moves to a newer line and doesn't update drivers to work with the latest version of DirectX. More often, the company is acquired or simply goes out of business. It doesn't really matter whether the card is a good one or not - successive generations of software need successive updates of drivers. S3 is a case in point: they're not S3 anymore - they're SonicBlue, and their idea of product support involves a list of drivers that are probably older than the ones that came with the computer. I'd recommend a GeForce card, but I haven't gotten one myself. It's sad, but unfortunately this is one of those situations when choice has more to do with a company's strengths than the products - the GeForce 4 may be junk, but you know the company will be around long enough to provide tech support, something 3DFx can't say. Whatever you do, avoid this and any other products based on S3 chipsets.
Rating:
Summary: Beware legacy products
Review: You know what legacy products are, right? Those are computer peripherals or other hardware which aren't quite the same as similar products mentioned in the newest reviews. These other products get left behind when the manufacturer moves to a newer line and doesn't update drivers to work with the latest version of DirectX. More often, the company is acquired or simply goes out of business. It doesn't really matter whether the card is a good one or not - successive generations of software need successive updates of drivers. S3 is a case in point: they're not S3 anymore - they're SonicBlue, and their idea of product support involves a list of drivers that are probably older than the ones that came with the computer. I'd recommend a GeForce card, but I haven't gotten one myself. It's sad, but unfortunately this is one of those situations when choice has more to do with a company's strengths than the products - the GeForce 4 may be junk, but you know the company will be around long enough to provide tech support, something 3DFx can't say. Whatever you do, avoid this and any other products based on S3 chipsets.
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