I’m building a network that’s running high-end imaging software for a dentist office. The software I’m installing recommends the Diamond Viper PCI III card. Problem is the card is no longer made and no one seems to offer any information concerning the card. I know SONICblue Inc. bought out the company that built Diamond Viper PCI III card but they don’t offer much on legacy equipment. Can anyone tell me how to cross-reference the old Diamond Viper PCI III card with something that’s equivalent or better yet does anyone know where I could purchase Diamond Viper PCI III cards?

The display adapter usually gets hardware configured to the rest of the computer, i.e. the monitor, slot where it is screwed in, and so on. If the dentist's software is "windows based" then I don't see any reason why other display adapters won't work for that. The Radeon (ATI) 9000 4X AGP card has some really incredible features built in, for TV use, Video usage, MULTIPLE (more than two) monitor usage, and so on. You can find that one at less than a hundred bucks, which is probably CHEAPER than the slower PCI Viper cards. You can also try Ebay or search for the viper card on www.google.com Hey Intel, AMD rulez!

I used to have a Diamond Viper V770 and a Diamond Viper II. I have not heard of a Diamond Viper PCI III, nor is it listed on diamondmm's web site. However, it is obviously very old since PCI video cards are crap compared to what is available in AGP, and Diamond is no longer in business as of 1999. So, basically you are probably using very outdated software and almost any new video card on the market today will be more than sufficient to run whatever applications you may be using. However, if the software is at the CAD level, for example: working with wireframe or textured 3D modeling, then that is an entirely different story. You might want to consider using a professional 3D studio board with a 3D Labs chipset. They are about $1,000 to 12,000 for each video card. Check out the chipset manufacturer web page: www.3dlabs.com. This is just one suggestion, there are other professional 3D studio boards available, because they are so expensive I suggest you shop around and get some other advise.

Yes, I know what you are working on. I am trying to get Dentrix Imaging going also. Of course, it works great on Win98. Dentrix gave me the Betas 3.1.014, 3.1.021, and 3.1.024. All to no avail. The drivers you can try are on any of the beta copies under disk1 directory. I have not had any luck with them. I am using a Koutech 607a vid cap card and I have tried 9 different drivers on it. Almost all of them work with any program other than Dentrix. I called Dentrix (Image) support today and they told me that the only vid cap card they support is the Viper IV. Heck, you and I could not even find the Viper III. Obviously, the only way we can get Dentrix image going now is to buy the Viper IV card from Dentrix. Grab your wallet, it is $300 (for a $40 card). So far, I cannot get it through any of my wholesale resources. In fact, none of my sources have even heard of it. It seems that Dentrix is probably getting it just for themselves and are ripping off their customer base. While I think Dentrix is superior to all the other dental softwares, they are getting to be too greedy. In short, they are starting to piss me off. Oh, I tried many, many combinations of cards and drivers with XP, XP Pro, and XP.NET (XP server-beta). All of them have failed so far to get Imaging working. Good luck. And... if you have any luck getting image going, e-mail me and let me know what what you find. Arnold Baker ajbaker@rcsis.com