Manufacturer: Skywell Tech: PCI based Voodoo2 with 12Mb EDORAM Bundle: Nuttin Price: ERP ~$150

Joining the ranks of dozens of other Voodoo2 reference boards we find Skywell's Magic 3D 2. Taiwanese graphics board manufacturers, Skywell Technologies, originally came to our attention when releasing their Magic 3D way back in 97 - just as it's successor it was (and still is) a pure reference design board based on those speedy chipsets created by 3Dfx Interactive.

Skywell as most other Taiwan based manufacturers doesn't exactly play in the same league as the big boys (Diamond, Creative etc.). They don't have huge bundles, spicy drivers, tasty looking boxes, nor technical innovations, such as the ones found on Canopus' Pure3D II. What they do have is high quality - low price boards offering the same perks as found on say the Monster 3D II. In other words, it's a plain vanilla Voodoo2 that works just as you'd expect it to.

Being a Vooodoo2 based 3D accelerator, the Magic 3D 2 is still a high performance card sporting dual texturing units and a solid 3D feature set including all the standard buzz words. Recently we've even been blessed with Anti-aliasing support (software emulated but still..) and the Voodoo2 has full support for Tri-linear filtering without taking a speed penalty in most applications. The Voodoo2 does have its shortcomings though. For one it lacks the ability to render in a window (useful for apps, not games). Also, the resolution support isn't all that and then some, with a single board you can't go beyond 800 x 600 with Z-buffering enabled. However, with two you can do 1024 x 768 but when looking at competing products such as the RIVA TNT this isn't impressive (the TNT does 1600 x 1200). Did I mention the Voodoo2 can't do 24 or 32bit rendering either? Well it can't.