Price: $289.99 Retail before $20 mail in rebate. ($269.99 after)

Guillemot throws their hat into the GeForce 256 ring this week with the arrival at retail of their NVIDIA GeForce 256-based board, the 3D Prophet. It features 32MB onboard RAM, a 350MHz RAMDAC and TV-Out capabilities, a 256-bit rendering engine, integrated geometry transform and lighting (through OpenGL or DirectX 7) and a four-pixel-per-clock rendering pipeline. It also supports AGP4X with Fast Writes, newly implemented DirectX (7) features like cube environment mapping, vertex blending and projective textures and is optimized for software DVD acceleration and video playback. As you can tell, it's a pretty big hat.

As we have already checked the reflexes of NVIDIA's GeForce 256 DDR reference design in our NVIDIA GeForce 256 DDR Guide and Kert has put the GeForce 256 architecture under his microscope for the grueling NVIDIA GeForce 256 In-Depth technology article, we were happy just to sit down and play a bit with our first actual GeForce 256 retail product.

We have previously been quite impressed by Guillemot's offerings. In fact, their Maxi Gamer Xentor 32 Ultra board won first place in our 6-Way 3D Video Accelerator Shoot-Out earlier this year. We have come to expect nothing less than solid implementation, good value and straight talk from Guillemot.

In keeping with that straight talk tradition, we've decided to toss out our review template, get down to the nitty gritty and explore the questions you would ask if you were here...

• How fast is it compared to other boards?
  
• Can I make it go even faster?
  
• How will it perform on my system?
  
• What is under the hood?
  
• What are my cost/performance tradeoff choices?
  
• Will I kick myself later for not waiting for the next NEXT BIG THING?
  

For the answers to these questions and a bushel full of benchmarks, click away...