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| XGI/Club3d Volari Duo V8 256mb |
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Review: Stuart
"Veridian3"
Davidson
The Drivers (The stability of the card with specific applications/games will be discussed with the benchmarks so head on over to those sections for the specifics.) Upon installing the card into the test system everything seemed to go fine, Windows booted and the add hardware wizard kicked in. As usual this was closed and the XGI driver setup was run (1.01.51). The installer was relatively straight forward, giving you the option to chose which components were installed. Once the options were chosen is started the install. Cue bug number 1….the driver install just hung. No error, nothing. This was fixed by cancelling out of the installer and restarting it however it was an ominous sign.
(NOTE: The latest drivers available on the XGI or Club3d site are 1.01.51 – these are not WHQL certified. The only WHQL driver we were able to find was release 1.0 from November 03) On the second install things went more smoothly, all components installed and life seemed good. When prompted the system was restarted. Following the reboot I went to set up the desktop, first stop resolution change to 1280x960. You can imagine my surprise when the option for 1280x960 desktop res wasn’t available! Both on the older R1.0 and the latest 1.01.51 you cannot select that resolution…the closest is 1280x1024. A matter of personal taste really, however such a silly little thing to leave out. The control panel for the Volari series is very tidy, split into 5 sections you can find all the options you are likely to need from Gamma/colour settings to AA/AF. Speaking of AA/AF this was the next big surprise, despite the huge theoretical power of the Volari V8 Duo’s 2 cores, 16 pipelines and 256mb of ram the maximum Anti Aliasing setting is 4x and the maximum Anisotropic filtering setting is also 4x. This means that as far as achieving maximum IQ the Volari is already on the back foot against ATI and Nvidia.
A handy option as standard in the Reactor drivers is an overclocking tab, no third party utility needed. This is accompanied by V-Drive, a driver option similar to ATI’s overdrive. V-Drive allows the cards speed to be altered depending on the conditions. We shall look at these functions in more detail in the overclocking section. Our final observation on the drivers
is the WDM/capture driver install. There is no option during the
installation wizard for the reactor drivers to install the WDM
driver. Instead you have to install the display driver, reboot
and you are then prompted to install the driver for “unknown
hardware”. This could be quite confusing if you didn’t
know the card featured this functionality.
Next: Test Setup
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