Manufacturer: STB Tech: PCI based nVidia RIVA TNT board with 16Mb SDRAM and TV-out Bundle: Forsaken by Acclaim, 3D Screen Saver by Colorific, Web3D by Asymetrix, Software DVD Player and Digital Video Producer by Asymetrix Price: $199

STB has long been a company seeking to join the ranks of Creative Labs and Diamond Multimedia atop the sales volume pinnacle. Over the last few years, STB has risen steadily in both market share percentage and penetration (hey now) by offering performance-oriented products that don't break the buyer's piggy bank.

Faithful readers of SharkyExtreme know that we tested the AGP version of STB's Velocity V4400 TNT card last week. The card performed very well, and is a solid choice for buyers seeking a well-rounded video card solution.

This week we felt that it would be interesting to explore some of the differences between the AGP and PCI versions of the V4400, and to finally answer some of the questions concerning exactly how much performance a user gives up by not updating to the AGP standard.

Here are the specs on the V4400 PCI card, they're pretty much identical to the stats for the AGP version....

· 16MB of 125MHz SDRAM (Clocked to 110MHz)
· OpenGL ICD
· 32bpp Rendering Support as well as Z-Buffer accuracy
· 250MHz RAMDAC
· Maximum 1920 x 1200 x 32 Win95/98 Desktop Resolution
· Up to 180 million pixels/second peak fill rates
· 6 million polygons per second peak processing
· 2.0 GB/second peak bandwidth
· 9 GFLOPS geometry processor
· 36 billion operations per/sec pixel pipeline
· Single-pass trilinear filtering
· Single-pass multi-texture processing