The MAXI Gamer 3D2
by Guillemont
The MAXI Gamer 3D2 by Guillemont International is the second Voodoo2 card we got for review–unfortunately was only an 8MB card, but that shouldn’t affect things too much.
First impressions
The box the card came packed in was quite large. After opening up the box I found the standard components inside. Card, cables, software, manuals, and various other pieces of information. The manual was surprisingly thick, and I soon found out the reason; it was written in three languages, French, English, and German. Fortunately the presence of three languages didn’t detract for the completeness of the manual. There was a nice list on what should be included in the box so you could make sure you got everything. I wish more companies would do this. The installation instructions were adequate, and had useful diagrams and pictures. The software installation instructions had screen shots for most of the critical steps. Which is a critical omission from many manuals. There were also explanations of the various driver options, another nice feature since sometimes the help files, if any, are inadequate. There was also a nice glossary near the end of the section that gave definitions of various terms that you might encounter. A nice touch!
Installation
Installation was straight forward. Pop the card in, install the VGA pass through cable, and fire up the machine. The only problem I ran into was on the installation of the software for the card. The machine didn’t detect the existence of the card on startup and I was forced to install the driver software in a more “manual” fashion. This isn’t a failing of the card, but it would have been nice if alternate installation steps would have been included in the manual.
The drivers that ship with the MAXI Gamer 3D2 have a good set of features. Although they don’t include an over clocking setting like Canopus’s card, they do have some other nice additions. If you wish you can set the refresh rate for each resolution setting. This setting is separate from the one for you main VGA card, and is only used when the MAXI Gamer is kicked in for your 3D games. This allows you to make sure that your game is running at a resonable refresh rate on your monitor. Standard gamma correction settings are also available. One nice thing is that you can have separate settings for either the Direct3D API or the GLIDE API or have the same for both. This allows you to tweak things a little more to your taste if you wish. I found however that the default settings worked just fine.
The advanced properties windows allows you to tweak your card further. There is a nice section in the manual that give adequate descriptions of each of these settings. I suggest that if you want to change any of these settings that you consult the manul first. Fortunately in all the settings window there is a default button that returns all settings to the factory defaults.
Performance
The MAXI Gamer 3D2 performed very will in our tests. In the Forsaken test the card pumped out 54fps. In Quake II the Gamer 3D2 game put out a nice 36 fps in 640x480, and 34fps in 800x600. Demonstrating once again that the Voodo2 cards hold up under higher resolutions. Under Turok the card kicked out 38fps with the Direct3D driver and 47fps with the custom driver. Winbench scores were also fairly impressive, 343 in Winbench 3D and a 7.23 on the 3D processing test.
Another 3DFX card that performs up to expectation. I wish we had been able to test the 12Meg version, but the 8Meg version performed very well indeed.
The verdict
The MAXI Gamer 3D2 is a nice 8Meg card, with a fairly decent manual. I would like to have seen the manual have a troubleshooting section and perhaps elaborate more on certain technical issues, but a nice manual with a good glossary. The driver set is decent and seemed very solid. It had some nice basic features, as well as access to more advanced driver settings if you wanted to tweak things a bit. A nice offering from Guillemont International.