Yesterday I gave you the low down of what Diamond's Voodoo Banshee product could do under some pretty powerful circumstances- I mean with a Pentium II 400Mhz machine. And what you saw was that the Monster Fusion was pretty comfortable under those conditions. It had superb D3D and Glide performance and almost managed a pretty acceptable frame rate for Quake 2 at 1024x768- almost. But for today's part two of this preview I can now tell you a little more as well as give you a shot of the board (Amer from Cyrellis3D so kindly helped out with that). Firstly the name of the board has been announced and in case you don't know the name, it's called the Diamond Monster Fusion. As for the price of the thing well that has also been announced and it will be a rather affordable $149. Now that the info has been made public I can stop calling it the Diamond Banshee product too. How nice.

I also decided to stick the card in a lower-end machine just to give you an idea of how it would cope. Loads of you wrote in asking about how it performed on an AMD K6-2 3D CPU so off I went to do some benchmarks for you folks (At the time of going to press the 3DNow! drivers were not working for Quake2). I took on board the comments and started to see that the price of $149, which has also been announced, shows you exactly where the card is being marketed at- the entry level and mid-range. With that in mind the K6-2 3D fits in snuggly I think. In fact, I got some really decent Quake 2 and Incoming scores, as you will see from the graphs that follow. In fact when playing Incoming it was a very close cal between the Banshee a single Voodoo2, with the Banshee just pipping it with a few more frames per second.

Like I said in part one, if you're looking for a Voodoo Banshee for a really high-end system because you're a hard nut of a gamer, then don't sweat. Although the Voodoo Banshee in this quarter might not harbor the Quake 2 performance you are looking for with only a single TMU- there is hope yet. You can expect the next Voodoo Banshee product in between the current Voodoo Banshee and the 'Rampage' to harbor some two TMUs and a whole lorry load of memory. My guess is that it actually won't be long before we start seeing about 64MB of RAM on 3D graphics cards. A scary thought- but a good one nonetheless.