In today's nVIDIA vs 3dfx race to be king of the 3D accelerator market it's easy to overlook offerings from other chip makers. While the TNT2 Ultra and Voodoo 3 3000 are very impressive, they also reflect that impressiveness at the check-out counter. With the average price of either card weighing in well beyond the $90-100 price point that the average PC gamer is willing to spend.

This leaves "Joe gamer-on-a-budget" with some tough choices when choosing a new video card. Sure, you can get a TNT2 M64 or a Voodoo 3 2000 at the budget price point, but, each has it's drawbacks. The M64 with it's full feature set but castrated 64-bit memory pipe, or, the Voodoo 3 2000 with it's generations old technology, only 16MB of RAM, and no support for 32-bit color, textures larger than 256x256 or AGP rendering.

Well, there is another choice that you may not have heard much about. It's Diamond Multimedia's Stealth III S540. The Stealth III S540 offers a full 32MB of RAM, full AGP 2x/4x support, decent 32-bit color performance, hardware assisted DVD playback and S3 Texture Compression (S3TC) for stunning visuals without much of a performance hit.

The Stealth brand has represented Diamond's value line for quite some time and things haven't changed since S3 acquired Diamond in a merger. The S540 does quite a good job of continuing the Stealth lineage with an average street price of about $80-$90.

Interested? Well, read on...