Installation, Drivers and Overclockability

As I said before, Leadtek had already released newer drivers for the time I was working on this review, based on NVIDIA's 118 reference, this drivers offered better stability and support for AMD CPUs and its 3DNow! instructions as well as speed enhancements, however I noticed that when I switched to this set of drivers the card was automatically underclocked to NVIDIA's default 125/150, according to Leadtek this change was made due to NVIDIA's request and not because of any problems running at higher speeds since you can still overclock the card to those 140/150 or push it even higher if you want to.

Although Leadtek drivers have nothing special compared to other manufacturer's drivers (Diamond's Viper InControl Tools come to mind), and actually they look pretty much like NVIDIA's reference drivers (with the exception of that Leadtek logo =)), I was glad to see that Leadtek has got sure you'll get the max from the WinFast S320 II, that's why they've included a handy overclocking utility out of the box so you don't have to use Powerstrip or any 3rd party program to overclock the card. I tried a lot of combinations and I found that 150/175mhz was the best overclock I could get. I was able to clock it even higher, up to 160mhz for the core, but it wasn't too stable, I noticed some artifacts in the screen and after a few hours, the PC crashed.

You also have the option of disabling V-Sync in the menu so you don't have to modify any registry keys, however if you've got a good monitor that supports refresh rates higher than 100hz I wouldn't recommend you to disable V-Sync, actually I only recommend disabling it for benchmarks and for running OpenGL games.

The card has also got a TV-out connector, based on the Booktree 869 encoder you can expect S320 II's TV-out to be as good as most of other cards of the same price range.

Both NTCS and PAL standards are supported so you shouldn't have any problems using this feature and the addition of a new tab in the display properties dedicated to TV output should make your life even easier.

 

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