Maxi Gamer Phoenix Banshee

Removing the Phoenix from its extremely eye catching package revealed a fairly tightly packed cardboard box containing the board itself, along with the installation guide, an installation CD-ROM, as well as the game bundle among the normal warranty card mess you find in all products of this nature. 

Exploring the board itself, the Phoenix turns out to be much like any other next-generation combo board either out on the market now or soon to be released.  The slot-length board fit snugly into the PCI slot of AnandTech's ABIT BX6 Pentium II test system and provided absolutely no problems at start-up in terms of the physical hardware installation.

The test system was purposely prepared with a previous set of drivers from various other 3rd party video adapter manufacturers in order to test compatibility in carelessly installed situations.  The Phoenix didn't prove to fly high in this case and caused numerous crashes and conflicts resulting in a horrendous 640 x 480 x 16 bit color resolution until the previous drivers were removed in safe mode and Windows reverted to the standard VGA graphics driver.  After this, the Guillemot driver installation went without a hitch. 

Guillemot included a CDR outfitted with their latest drivers at the time of the review, before the card begins shipping you can expect a bit of a maturing process for the drivers as the set AnandTech tested with had no native OpenGL support rendering the Quake2 and SiN benchmarks useless as the test system simply wouldn't run the tests.  Luckily the drivers seemed to work fine with Glide implementations under Unreal as well as Direct3D games such as Forsaken.  Currently released Banshee cards such as those from companies like Quantum3D do have operational OpenGL support so it seems as if the problem with the Guillemot card AnandTech tested can easily be fixed with a driver upgrade. 

Guillemot's bundled display properties utility did very little for the Banshee in terms of tweaking it for the greatest performance.   No overclocking slider bars or even a Enable/Disable V-Sync checkbox was provided for in the newly added configuration tab in the Display Properties Control Panel.   While the Banshee already gets hot enough, the ability to overclock the RAM on the board right out of the box would've been nice, however it looks like it's over to AGN3D or Voodooextreme for the latest tweak utilities for this board. 

Super7 users will want to wait for updated drivers as well, the Maxi Gamer Phoenix wasn't too Super7 friendly as the card consistently crashed randomly during all 3D benchmarks, regardless of API.  Further testing will prove whether the problems experienced were motherboard, chipset, or video card specific and you can expect the first word on any developments on AnandTech's frontpage. 

The initial installation and configuration of the card wasn't too big of an ordeal since Guillemot's multi-lingual User Manual helped sort out the installation process.  Unfortunately, only after exploring the readme file bundled with the drivers were many of the card's anomalies explained.  The initial install of the graphics drivers had to be performed over a Standard VGA driver as mentioned earlier, then switched over to the Maxi Gamer Phoenix drivers at a resolution/color depth other than 640 x 480 x 16-bit color.  Guillemot chose to package the board with both Windows 95 and 98 drivers, however NT drivers should be shipping closer to the card's public release. 

The card was packaged with a copy of Tonic Trouble, which is more of a younger children's title rather than your run of the mill gory first person shooter that you're used to, and don't worry, you won't have any more copies of Forsaken lying around the house after picking up this card.  Guillemot wisely chose to replace the standard filler title, Forsaken, with a more appropriate, and in this reviewer's opinion, much better, title: Half-Life - Day One.  If you are a Quake2 fan, prepare to meet your new best friend, Sierra's Half-Life.  While the bundled version of Half-Life isn't the full release, it'll still provide you with some awesome gameplay until the final version becomes available.  Once Guillemot updates their drivers, Half-Life will definitely be the cherry on top of this ferocious pie.