• The Guillemot Xentor 32. Once I got past the early drivers and ran them with the 1.88 reference drivers, this board blossomed like a debutante emerging from wallflower status.

• The Hercules Dynamite TNT2. It takes a licking and keeps on ticking. It clocks higher and runs more stable than any other TNT2 board with a built-in performance slider. But it's no slouch at its default 175/200 speed. Now if Hercules can just write a decent setup program....

• The Voodoo3/3000 is the price/performance leader for 3D games. It's very nearly as fast in 16-bit games as the Xentor or Hercules boards. Think of it as the Dodge Viper of graphics cards - stripped down to the bare essentials, what it does do, it does very well.

• The Leadtek Winfast II Ultra. This is a real sleeper. It's fast, stable, highly clockable, and fairly low cost.

• The Diamond Viper 770. This Viper has the most elegant software interface of the bunch and is no performance slouch, either. And it even has a software bundle.

In addition, there are some products to keep an eye on. The Matrox G400 will be a stronger contender when equipped with better OpenGL ICD. The Voodoo3/2000 is an amazing little performer for the price. The other card worth watching is the Creative Labs TNT2 Ultra. The initial drivers shipped with the cards were a little buggy and lacked a core clock slider. Creative is adding a core clock slider in the next actual driver release, however.

I noted my disappointment with the Savage4 boards earlier, but another, lesser disappointment was the Guillemot Xentor 16. When running early drivers for this card, the performance was nothing short of amazing - but subsequent driver releases have run quite a bit slower. Perhaps the 1.88 drivers will boost performance back up. The Permedia 3 was a disappointment, too, but it was never targeted as a gamer's card.

I didn't have the chance to test every board on the K6-2/400 system, but it's clear that the K6-2 is CPU bound - the GameGauge scores are much more compressed. A good TNT2 card with the 1.88 drivers or one of the Voodoo3 boards are probably the best performers on AMD systems, as both 3dfx and Nvidia have taken the time to add 3Dnow optimizations to their drivers.

My personal favorite on a fast Pentium III is either the Xentor or Hercules board. Expect to see one of them in GameSpot's Power Rig soon.

But if you look at all the boards, what's striking is how good even the slowest boards are. A year ago, boards like the Create! and Stealth III S540 would have been knockouts. It's just a testament to how fast the industry is moving. And who knows what might appear this fall....

Next: Take me to the Charts