As with any Canopus product you know what you're gonna get is a pretty charged up board, with plenty of innovation around the original reference design. They just don't go around reproducing reference designs. Being a small operations based company they can't afford to- if they did do that, the likes of Creative and Diamond would gobble up their market share.

For coupling with your Voodoo or Voodoo2 boards, the Spectra 2500 provides an added feature: the exclusive "WitchDoctor" allows you to externally connect your game card to your graphics card for improved clarity of your high resolution desktop image. Pure3D II/LX/LXf owners can do this with an internal cable meaning that that there's less of a spaghetti junction at the back of your PC. In addition, the included drivers allow you to use the famous Canopus Quick Control and Application Launcher utilities. Since the TNT chipset doesn't support Glide, the ability to use a Voodoo card, which does support Glide, with the SPECTRA 2500 allows user to get the most play out of their systems. It's a match made in heaven and a great marriage for Pure 3D II owners. Thanks to WitchDoctor technology, gamers can use these cards in combination to play OpenGL, Direct3D, DirectX 6.0, as well as Glide games. The WitchDoctor technology receives the 3D signal, through an internal connection, from the Pure3D II or Pure3D II LX to the SPECTRA 2500, then directly to the monitor or TV. This direct way of handling the video improves signal quality and eliminates cable clutter. Thus they've milked Nvidia's TNT for all its worth. Canopus' work shines with the innovative 'Witch Doctor' capabilities.

In addition, the Spectra 2500 harbors a high quality on-board fan which is meant to keep the chip cool (still burnt my fingers though!). And cool it has to be because Canopus have clocked the board internally to 100MHz (STB and Diamond will be clocking it to 90MHz) with the 16MB SDRAM clocked to 115MHz. With it being clocked to 100Mhz the Quake2 benchmarks were indeed faster than the Voodoo Banshee's and not too far off from a single Voodoo2 but I do have a problem with the reliability. Unfortunately the board itself wasn't all that stable running Quake2 and crashed consistently- especially at the very high resolutions (1600x1200 and 1024x768). But then again my board was pulled out from engineering, using beta drivers (and it had a bad haircut, blah blah blah) and therefor not quite a 100% fully-fledged final boxed up product. I would gladly give Canopus the benefit of the doubt- I spoke to their engineering department and they assured me that the release drivers will be more stable and so I'll leave it at that. However, I am still a little concerned about the heat problem though- there were numerous lock-ups, which perhaps indicates that the Spectra 2500 isn't all that stable being clocked to 100Mhz. Maybe the final product will be more stable- and maybe the drivers will keep the card clocked down to 90Mhz similar to Diamond's and STB's? For Canopus' sake, I hope they pull it off by the time the card goes on sale. The extra 10Mhz clock speed does squeeze approximately 10fps in Quake2, which is exactly what pushes it past the Voodoo Banshee.