Viper II Set to Ship

This morning, S3 announced that engineering on the Viper II is complete, and the boards are expected to go into full production in time to reach store shelves by mid-November. The Viper II will be the first Savage2000-powered video card on the market, and unless S3 decides to sell its chips to board companies like Number Nine, the Viper II will be the only Savage2000 video card on the market.

We recently visited S3 to test the Viper II. Considering S3's recent history of manufacturing chipsets that weigh value over performance, the Viper II did extraordinarily well and managed to stay somewhat competitive with Nvidia's GeForce 256. Couple the Viper II's performance with its S3TC texture-compression compatibility, and the board suddenly seems a very attractive (and affordable) alternative to the GeForce 256.

The standard Viper II comes with 32MB of SDRAM and with a game bundle that includes Acclaim's TrickStyle and demos of Jetboat, Hot Chix, Gear Stix, Tower of the Ancients, and Slave Zero. Additionally, an S3-designed and S3TC-enhanced level of Quake III: Arena will also be included with the Viper II.S3 plans to release nine more of these levels through the Diamond Underground web site for free in the coming weeks. We'll have a full review, complete with comparative benchmarks, next week.

Gamers can expect Viper II cards to start slithering onto retailers shelves in mid-November.