Ron LaFon

The Wildcat VP970 is the newest and most capable of a family of four midrange graphics cards from 3Dlabs.

At an estimated street price of $559 (suggested retail price $595), this particular model in the ATI Technologies' Fire GL series, the Z1, is moderately priced, even though it is a dual-headed graphics card with 128MB of DDR RAM.

Nvidia's current top-of-the-line graphics card powered its way to great performance scores in this round of benchmark testing, falling slightly off the top place in only the SPEC ViewPerf 7.0 proe-01 benchmark.

We first looked at the Matrox Parhelia128 in our last roundup of graphic cards, but the drivers were still in beta and in the process of being optimized.

Though our roundup of current graphics cards features some very strong contenders, no across-the-board leader emerged.

This is the first 3.06GHz Pentium 4 system to come through Cadalyst Labs for testing, and it did not fail to impress.

Five full-featured Pentium 4 workstations combine solid technology with processing power for demanding CAD applications. Check out these top systems from Dell, Pogo Lenux, Sys Technologies, Tri CAD/CAD Systems, and Xi Computer.

The Xi 4286 MToser SP incorporates NVIDIA's Latest AGP 8X graphics card, the Quadro4 980XGL.

21 Monitors Reviewed

21 Monitors Reviewed