Initially we set out on the wrong tangent. The board that STB gave us was intended for review purposes but unfortunately we don't feel that the board we received is up to Sharky Extreme review standards. Not due to the technology involved, but because of the board's current Alpha3 status and possibly due to bad RAM on our particular board. Without the full array of software (no edge tools), LCDfx, game bundle and TV-Out, the best we can hope to offer you, our readers, is a comprehensive run-down of the technology involved and, of course, whatever benchmarks we could muster.

Now don't get us wrong, when the Voodoo3 3500 hits the retail sector, it should still be the fastest 3D card around (TNT2 being the wild card), it's just that the board we have in our lab will NOT be a board that you will ever be able to purchase. Which is a very good thing because from initial installation, this particular unit obviously had some pretty serious problems. In fact, the board itself didn't even last for the three days of scheduled testing and finally gave out and just died on us. Clearly this is unacceptable for review purposes. STB has promised to rectify the situation and we shall update you when we get a fully functioning unit.

The board even now lying dormant (funeral services to be held Monday at 12:00 noon) in the AGP slot of our number four test machine is a Voodoo3 3500 (the high-end board) with 16MB of SGRAM provided by SIEMENS. Although the speed of the memory and graphics clock is supposed to be stable when running at 183Mhz, we were forced to add extra cooling fans (check out the photo) and turn the clock down to 179MHz just to get any benchmarks to run more than twice in succession without crashing. This was consistent with multiple CPU speeds and in multiple machines.

There's no reason for us to actually proclaim that 183Mhz doesn't work because we've got it on good word from Stephen Heaslip (Blue from Blue's News) that his board (the exact same spec as ours) runs just fine at the 183MHz speed. Of the ten boards given out to the press, we're quite prepared to give 3Dfx/STB the benefit of the doubt and sit back and say that we merely got a bad apple.