The world first learned of the Diamond Viper V770 through the shocking previews performed by two of the internet's most well respected hardware review sites, Sharky Extreme and Tom's Hardware. At the time, there were no other TNT2 cards to compare the V770 to, and the Voodoo3 drivers weren't as mature as they are now. The combination of those two factors placed the Viper V770 at the top of everyone's wish list, simply because it was beyond the fastest thing the market had ever seen. Soon enough, Diamond had pre-orders worked out with Electronics Boutique and offered to take pre-orders for the card on their page as well.

From Diamond's perspective, the V770 was thrust into the position of the company's graphics flagship. 3dfx left Diamond, along with a handful of other companies in the cold as they merged with STB, if anything, Diamond has a large void to fill as a result of 3dfx's absence. Diamond isn't any better off now that 3dfx has left their Voodoo3 wishes unfulfilled, Diamond's primary goal here is to make sure that they aren't any worse off without the backing of 3dfx's high powered chips. This obviously puts a lot of pressure on NVIDIA to succeed, and ultimately inspired NVIDIA to drop the originally speculated clock speed of the TNT2 Ultra part down to 150MHz for the core frequency and 183MHz for the memory frequency. Diamond, not willing to go out on the same limb Hercules and Guillemot have traversed, willingly changed the specs on their two TNT2 based cards to reflect the changes. The top of the line Viper V770 Ultra card now weighing in at a 150MHz core setting with 32MB of 183MHz SDRAM.

The Specifications

Controller:

NVIDIA RIVA TNT2 ULTRA

True 128-bit

Bus Type:

AGP 4X

(Compatible with AGP 1X/2X)

Memory:

32MB SDRAM

Integrated RAMDAC

300MHz

Horizontal Sync Signals:

31.5KHz-108.5KHz

Vertical Refresh:

60Hz-200Hz

Maximum Dot (Pixel) Rate:

300MHz RAMDAC

Monitors Supported:

Standard and Multi-frequency Analog Monitors

DDC2B Plug and Play

Video Playback:

AVI and MPEG-1

DVD/MPEG-2 requires DVD ROM Drive

Multi-tap X and Y scaling and filtering

Color space conversion

Connectors:

DB-15 analog monitor connector

Drivers

Windows . 95/98, including DirectX 6 and OpenGL . ICD

Windows NT 4.0, including OpenGL ICD

Microsoft WHQL Certified