Quantum 3D Obsidian 2 AGP
Here we have a very special Voodoo² accelerator. First you will be staring at the strange design: A small daughter board is mounted at the back side with an own slot cover and requires two things you should look after. First you absolutely need another case opening ABOVE the one for the AGP slot, second the CPU has to be as far away from the case as possible (along the direction of the slots). The little daughter board can make the installation of this card impossible if the CPU is in the way. Therefore I couldn't test the card with the Soyo motherboard; I had to use a Chaintech 6BTM motherboard instead. This mechanical problem is more important than you may think. If you want to get the Quantum 3D AGP card, be sure it fits into your board. With Socket 7 system this is no issue, but the Pentium II could interfere with the little TV add-on board.
Thanks to the double bus clock (66 MHz AGP) the benchmark results are better than those from PCI accelerators. The design is very smart: Each side of the board carries 6 MB memory. One texelfx², the pixelfx² and as well the RAMDAC are placed on the front side, the back side accommodates the second texelfx². Above the AGP connector the card does only require about 1.5". That's the shortest Voodoo² card I've seen so far.
The software bundle contains the same game demos as the PCI version. The drivers allow you to overclock the chips to 100 MHz, but this wasn't running stable at all. Better leave the slider at the default of 95 MHz, this is hot enough and works properly.
Good news from the loop cable: The picture quality is fine for resolutions up to 1024x768, higher resolution become visibly worse.
