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Ease of Installation: 6 Features: 8 Performance: 9 Value: 8 Reviewer's Tilt: 9

The other 3Dfx Voodoo offering in our roundup is, not surprisingly, a fantastic 3-D hardware product.

Like the Diamond Monster 3D, this card, which works as an add-in board (meaning that it requires the presence of a graphics card), performed stupendously in all our tests. The "straight-to-hardware" games such as Descent II, MechWarrior 2, and VR Soccer looked beautiful and played with incredible smoothness even on a relatively slow Pentium 100 machine.

The Direct3D Tunnel and Twist results were identical to the Monster 3D's, scoring just over 60 fps on each. The Direct3D test scores were also impressive, and although slightly lower than the Monster 3D scores, were still significantly ahead of the pack. The most interesting aspect of Voodoo chip performance on the Direct3D test was that, when adding complicated features to the fill test, the score did not drop much at all. Typically, a board would render and fill about one-fourth as many pixels with these complicated features turned on. The Righteous 3D (as well as the Monster 3D), on the other hand, showed very little difference in score.

This amazing testimony to the strength of this hardware comes out when playing Direct3D titles. Monster Truck Madness looked better on this board than on any other, and played without a single hitch.

The question really comes down to which Voodoo-based board to buy. Diamond's installation process went slightly more smoothly, the card performed a tiny bit better, and they bundle a few more titles with their Microsoft Game Sampler CD. On the other hand, the Righteous 3D does ship with MechWarrior 2 and other important titles. Although the inclination is slightly in Diamond's favor, it's almost too close to call.