- - - - - Canopus, a Japanese based Corporation is a name highly recognized with excellent video-editing products and bundled utilities. Some years back, they tried their hand at the video-card market as they had the technical know-how and produced their 1st video card, the Canopus Total3D using the Rendition Verite-1000 chipset, which was a product to cater to the then just started 3D video-cards. The Canopus Totla3D was one of the 1st video-cards to be equipped with '3D' glasses and really promoted their kit as a high-end gaming card (it was written 'Caution' all over it!).

Moving on, they still concentrated on the gaming market to carry on making the Canopus-Pure3D, which became the fastest Voodoo-1 card due to Canopus' special engineering and drivers and was the only Voodoo-1 card to be equipped with 6MB RAM and support for 800x600 resolution! Canopus became very famous by this time due to the exceptional features on the Pure3D. Next came the Canopus Total3D-128V utilising the Riva-128 chipset it had the fastest 3D performance of the Riva-128 category and was the 1st video-card to be equipped with TV-out and Video-input (The ATI All-in-Wonder was produced right after this to have TV-out, V-in and TV-tuner). The TV-output was powered by a Chrontel CH7002D-V which is considered to have one of the best TV-outputs, even today and could output to TV and monitor simultaneously. It was equipped with costly MoSys SGRAMs and its PCB is un-paralleled to any video-card, even the current Spectra series.

The Marshall Mathers Lp 2000 Zipcode here. As you can deduce by my words, Canopus products are usually the best engineered products in the market. Pure3D-2 was next and also has Canopus optimized drivers that produced the best Voodoo-2 results again. It had an option of adding Canopus' own fan and safely overclock the core to 100Mhz or higher and many more nifty stuff. When the Riva-TNT came along, the Spectra line was born, starting with the Spectra-2500 which sports a unique high quality heat-sink + fan combo, the exclusive 'WitchDoctor' technology and up to 920x690 TV-output resolutions, the highest so far. It also can be expanded with Video-Capture functions by means of the Canopus VideoPort-600. The Spectra-2500 was so well received that its sales ended quite soon because Canopus didn't expect such a good response and it had stopped producing the 2500 for sometime. To begin production, packaging and shipping the 2500 back to the retail channel again would be too late, therefore Canopus didn't produce anymore even though the demand was there.

Canopus then produced cheaper versions of the TNT named the Spectra-3200 but it mostly sold it in Japan itself. Soon after, Canopus officially announced that it will not be making anymore video-cards for the international market (due to high competition I assume), and will primarily be concentrating on it's original Video-editing business. However, Canopus still produces video-cards for its local market, Japan.

When the TNT2 chipset was announced, Canopus went into designing and now manufacturing two products based on the Riva-TNT2 and Riva-TNT2-Ultra chipsets called the Spectra-5400 and Spectra-5400 Premium Edition (PE) respectively. Between the two of them, the main difference was the chipset used and the amount and type of RAM installed. Of course everybody dreamed about these as not much is known about them. To make it even harder, the product can only be seen on the Japanese version of Canopus website and you must know their language in order to decipher what the features mean. Anyway, Convergent Systems (Singapore) has somehow got a deal or contract to bring in some Spectra-5400 PE video cards and I'm sure it's not the usual amount that distributors normally bring in. SHZ, was there on the 12th of July to get one of these rare gems to test out. This Spectra-5400 PE has a wealth of features and expansion options!

Hydrodynamic Bearing Fan, SSH, DFS, optional TV-out, optional BNC outputs, optional Video Port-600 and Canopus own utilities. Without further delay, let's meet the Spectra-5400 Premium Edition. The MediaScope is just a slightly updated version of the Total Cinema-EX program that was bundled with the Total3D-128V but it's looks far better and easier to handle than the Windows Media Player.

It can play Audio-CDs, numerous Video-types but the amount of recognised Audio types is much less, for e.g., I don't think it can play MP3 files. One thing about this Media-Scope, is that when I set it to play Video-CDs in FULL-screen, there are no black areas (most of the time) compared to when I play the same file through another player and see Black spaces on the top and bottom.

There are also some options to configure how this MediaScope looks and works. The 3rd program is WinDVD but unfortunately, I don't have any DVD-Drive nor does the CD contain any samples to try out. 3D Quality & Features What else would you have come to expect from a TNT2?

Excellent 3D quality of course (not Matrox style yet)! I used games like NFS3, NFS4 Star-Wars Episode-1: Phantom Menace, Star-Wars Episode-1: Pod-Racer, Quake-2 and tested the games at 1024x768 with extreme fluency.

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Canopus Spectra-5400 PE AGP 32MB SDRAM Benchmarking Software / Cpu Config Wintune98 Video (2D) / Mps Wintune98 Direct3D / Mps Wintune98 OpenGL / Mps Quake-2 Timedemo1 / fps Quake-2 Timedemo2 / fps 3D Mark99 / 3DMarks C-450A (4.5 x 100MHz) (Spectra) 109.1909 256.8559 162.0903 93.4 87.1 3953 C-450A (4.5 x 100MHz) (nVidia) 104.5184 197.9685 161.46 94.6 88.8 3891 C-450A (4.5 x 100MHz) (Creative) 99.15589 192.5483 157.5598 94.3 84.5 3970 Done @ 640 x 480 with OpenGL for Quake II V3.05, @ 800 x 600 for 3D Mark99 and @ 1024 x 768 for the Wintune98 tests. Colour depth = 16bit for all tests Looks like Canopus Spectra-drivers have some light tweaking to bring the overall higher results.

Anyway, this is just a rough overview and WT98 isn't a very accurate measure of performance. Overall, there are minute differences between the driver types and between the Spectra ans Creative cards but I'll deem it too minor to seriously consider the results to select between the different video cards. Below is a graph comparing the 32-bit colour performance drop compared to 16-bit colour using Quake-2. I've only included the results for the Celeron-450 and using Demo-1 because using any other CPU's and speed grade results in the exact same minor drop. Same goes for the Demo-2 results which reflects the same amount of drop as in Demo-1.

If you insist on seeing the results, you can ask me but it's not worth the comparison as u can see. I've used the 1.88 reference drivers and the given Spectra drives (dated 21/6/99) for further comparison. The performance drop is quite small as you can see from the graph and this is something you can assured of with the TNT2. Though this gap will widen when running a more complex benchmark like Crusher (unfortunately I don't have it), but there isn't much to worry as the performance drop will be much less than the previous TNT.

The maximum performance drop in games would be 15% to 20% lower than 16-bit scores. The different drivers also don't effect the performance. Next are the 3DMark99-Max results. The P3-450 results for both the Spectra-54000 and V3-3000 are with the help of Anurax who helped me to run some benchmarks while I was at his place. His system has 192MB of RAM which helped me to get 32MB texture size results.

3DMark99-MAX Results 3DMark Results CPU Geometry Speed Rasterizer Score Comparing with the V3-3000, the Spectra wins it by 2 marks! Creative-TNT2-Ultra is leading a wee-bit over the Spectra-5400 using the nVidia drivers for Celeron running at 450Mhz. At 300Mhz level, the Spectra using nVidia drivers has a tiny lead. It's quite a see-saw! Similar to the previous case.

Notice the P3's prowess in this area, thanks to it's SSE also. Look how an overclocked video-card performs here, quite good.

Game-1 Game-2 Fill-Rate Same remark as the 3DMark99 results. One would expect the TNT2 and V3 to score much higher using a P3-450 but all of them perform very similar as long as the clock speed is 450Mhz. Maybe a P3-500 would show a clearer picture. So far the V3-3000 is losing to the TNT2-Ultra by tiny edge. Creative TNT2-Ultra takes a tiny lead in Fill-Rate scores while not O/C. But when the Spectra was O/C, the score soars much higher.

Surprisingly V3 scores are quite low here, but. Fill-Rate with Multi-texturing 4mb Texture Rendering Speed 8mb Texture Rendering Speed In Multi-Texturing, V3 rules (along with the overclocked Spectra)! So you can see why V3 scores well in games like Q2 but for many other games not utilising Multi-texturing, the TNT2 and Ultra scores better.

Creative using nVidia drivers losses to the Spectra using nVidia drivers in both CPU speeds. Funny, V3-3000 is going quite strong here, meaning the TNT2s have a bigger performance drop with larger textures. 16mb Texture Rendering Speed 32mb Texture Rendering Speed Bump-Mapping Emboss, 3-pass And of course, with no AGP-Texturing support and many other AGP related features, the V3 struggles when it comes to utilising all it's available local memory. I don't have 128MB SDRAM to run the 32MB Texture file test, but since the P3-450 tests were done in another system with 192Mb of ram, I can get the score for at the Spectra and V3-3000. Notice that the TNT2-Ultra still gives good frame-rates even with 32MB textures, maximizing the card's local memory but AGP-Texturing still helps it get high scores unlike the V3-3000.

V3 rules over here. Bump-Mapping Emboss, 2-pass Bump-Mapping Emboss, 1-pass Notes As my version of 3DMark99-MAX is not registered, all results are based on an 800x600 resolution at 16-bit colour depth with each processor's proper optimization. Same as previous results. The V3 has no support for Single-Pass Bump-Mapping? Anyway Spectra is the winner in the bump-mapping tests with it's own drivers. I do hope Canopus hasn't tuned their drivers toward benchmarks as using nVidia drivers scores lower results.

Super-7 Talk I've been seeing so many queries regarding Super-7 motherboard compatibility with TNT/TNT2 video cards in our forums (clinics) that I decided to address it in this section. I've been running almost every video card successfully in my Super-7 combo for quite a while now and if there has been any compatibility issue, I would have addressed them in my reviews, but I still see many queries. Ok, if you have a VIA (MVP3, MVP3+) based motherboard your quite safe to use many of the current video adapters like TNT / TNT2. All you have to do is get the all the latest drivers for your motherboard from and update your windows. That's about it!

It also helps to get proven motherboards like Tyan, AOpen AX59-Pro, FIC-VA-503+ and DFI-P5BV3+/K6BV3+/K6XV3+ which are very stable, well designed boards and can use these high-powered video cards like TNT/TNT2 which draw a lot of power. If you're using the ALI Alladin-V chipset based motherboards, e.g. The most common of them are the MSI-5169 and the ASUS-P5A series, your going to have a tougher time to get your favourite TNT/TNT2 combo to work with this board even with the latest drivers from. This chipset itself has gone through many revisions but it still can't rectify the problems completely.

Whichever motherboard you have, do update your windows with all the latest motherboard drivers 1st before fixing in the TNT/TNT2 card. Also try not to overclock your video-cards while running on a super-7 motherboard as the TNT/TNT2 card already draws a lot of power, you will be straining the system by overclocking. And finally, if you need to buy a new Super-7 motherboard, get an MVP3+ based motherboard because it is technically superior to the ALI-chipset equivalent and it gives you less problems with new video-cards. Bottom-line is, all Super-7 can use TNT/TNT2 video cards but it depends how well your motherboard BIOS and drivers are updated, not to mention the video-card drivers. Additionally, if you have a lot of expansion cards and are having problems getting the new video card to work, try removing all the cards and plug in the new video-card to see if it works. The progressively add a card at a time to help the board smooth out the resources. The Bad Canopus uses the their own proprietary designs all the time to make video-cards.

This includes placing components in optimal positions and cutting down the amount of trace-lines found in reference boards and adding their own specialties like better fans, heatsinks, filters etc. But all that only helps to ring-out a maximum of 1 or 2 FPS at best. The rest of the improvement comes from its drivers. It's true that Canopus was the fastest for 3D for all the cards it produced. Offline Oxford Dictionary English To Hindi Free Download Full Version For Pc on this page. Though it was the tops in 3D performance for any given chipset-based video card it made, the lead was only a small one. In this Spectra-5400, I can see that the drivers it used were based on nVidia reference 1.88 drivers.

But surprisingly this time, its drivers are slower by 1 or 2 FPS when compared with nVidia's Reference 1.88 drivers. Even its newer drivers from the net showed no improvement, maybe it was to correct some minor faults. Many of you think the fan is extremely good, yes for its size it's extremely good but the amount of hot air thrown out isn't much better than the fans on Diamond and Creative cards.

But I must say the heatsink is better. Leaving the core, the whole card is warmer than the Creative TNT2-Ultra I had for review! The Spectra was as hot as the Creative was when it's overclocked! And the Canopus I have here is using EliteMT RAM, rated at 200Mhz.

Very good, but the damn thing is unstable even if I push it a little higher. The core was stable only till 170Mhz. Either, the design is at fault or the chip was lower in grade which could have been manufactured as a plain TNT2 that was tested to work well at 150Mhz, hence it was marked as a TNT2-Ultra. I do hope the latter reason is the cause of its poor overclocking stability. The card is only SUPER for its features and expansion, which is excellent. And this is where the card is recommended: You must have good uses for its features and expansion capabilities, else you're better off with standard brands.

Other pointers are: No hardware-DVD playback but using software still would look good albeit a higher CPU utilization. And of course the number-one baddie is the PRICE! It's retailing at SGD$555! I don't recall any video-card that expensive for a very long time. But it's the most feature packed and the most expansive (expansion-wise). Test System Configuration Processor(s) Intel Celeron-300A Ram 64MB 100MHz LGS-7J 10ns SDRAM Dimm Motherboard AOpen AX6BC-Pro HardDrive(s) IBM Deskstar-3 3.2Gb Operating System MS Windows 98 Build 4.10.1998 DirectX Version MS DirectX Version 6.1 Other software used PowerStrip 2.50 Video Card(s) Canopus Spectra-5400 AGP Video Card Drivers Canopus Spectra-5400 drivers (21/6/99) nVidia Reference drivers 1.88 Conclusion Well, that about wraps up the world's best video-card maker's new toy, the Canopus Spectra-5400 PE. Consider it for the brand, the features it offers, the utilities and because for its various expansion possibilities.

It's a 1st class-card! The downside is that it isn't very overclockable and chiefly, it's anybody's guess if ever the various expansion-gadgets will ever be imported to Singapore. With only a few select number of people willing to plonk down $550, my own opinion is that those gadgets won't be sold locally. VIDEO CARD RATING.

FIC FR33E motherboard? Reference: Photo To the far left side of the motherboard, is actually the Bottom of the motherboard, when installed in your computer case. The two White long expansion slots you see, are PCI expansion slots. If one is available, (Open), you can use a PCI USB adapter card. This is but one example, Seem cheap? Good quality also.

(You can also check the reviews) Need guidance in installing? 1) Follow Anti-Static Precautions Anti-Static Precautions: Your body carries Static electricity. Static WILL fry out (Short Circuit) the delicate hardware components inside the computer. Computer on a table, computer unplugged from power, computer case open. [Note* Always unplug the power to a computer AT the surge protector. NOT at the back of the computer. (Power Supply) You can cause a power surge ] 2) TOUCH an unpainted surface, of the metal frame of the open computer case.

This action will relieve your body of Static. Should you leave your computer in the middle of working on it, be SURE to Touch the metal frame again, upon your return. 3) Finding an open PCI slot look at the back of the computer. In the metal frame you will see slots going horizontally. These are Expansion Slots. You may have an add-on adapter card already installed, in one of the PCI slots. The expansion slot cover for it is removed.

You should see expansion slot covers however, in the remaining expansion slots on the back of the computer metal framework. Remove the one that corresponds with the PCI slot you wish to use. Be aware that the PCI slot will not be directly in line, with the expansion slot.

When installing an add-on adapter card, you will see when the card is inserted in the PCI slot, the metal bracket on the add-on card, lines up with an adjacent expansion slot. This will make more sense to you once you go to install the card. [PCI USB adapter card is an add-on adapter card ] Line the card up in the PCI slot. Note that there is a Locating Lug in the PCI slot, and a matching Locating Notch, on the PCI USB adapter card. Also, at the same time line up the metal bracket of the PCI USB adapter card, with the metal framework of the computer case at the back. Gently push the PCI USB adapter card down into the PCI slot.

Fasten the card's metal bracket to the computer's metal framework. Post the computer manufacturer name, and model number, if you need guidance in opening the computer case. Post in a Comment. For additional questions please post in a Comment.

Regards, joecoolvette 86 views 0 helpful votes. With internal video cards they normally automatically switch to PCI video cards that you put in without the need for switches or settings on the board. Just plug in the card and plug in the monitor on the card and you should be good.

Now if your board is one of the select few that require a change in the BIOS then you are out of luck. BUT, take note that 90% of the time that internal video cards do not work because of the memory. Take note that the memory that the internal video cards use is the memory on the board so you might want to check if your memory is working. 344 views 1 helpful votes. Getting inside a DVD drive would be tough. There are plastic components in these drives that can break or get pulled out of alignment with a bump. The slot is so small you probably won't be able to look inside either. You could try taking it out (disconnect the cables, remove the screws to take it out.) And if you get it out you can tip it upside down and maybe shake it out to see if any broken plastic pieces fall out.

If they do.then that DVD player is probably toast. If nothing falls out then you may have knocked it out of it's track and you may be able to wiggle it back in. Here's the thing.you have to do something.

So try to do some investigation and if you can't fix it.get a new one! 588 views 0 helpful votes.