Leadtek
GeForce 2 GTS review
Posted by
Adam
Klein on August 02, 2000
Company: Leadtek
Product: WinFast
GeForce
2 GTS videocard
 It has been a while since I've
done a hardware review. I may have been gone from the site for
a long time, but my love of computer hardware is still intact.
The newest review I present to you is that of the Leadtek
Winfast GeForce 2 GTS. NVIDIA GeForce 2 based boards have been
out now for quite some time and I've been using this board for
a great deal of that time. Now, I can share with you my
experiences with it.
Leadtek makes a wide range of
computer products; from video boards, to soundcards and even
mainboards, today Leadtek is best known for their video boards
based on NVIDIA chips, in fact they stand in the same class as
Creative Labs, Elsa, and Asus when it comes to delivering
video boards.
The Card
The Leadtek Winfast GeForce 2
is based upon the popular GeForce 2 GTS chipset. The GeForce 2
shares many of the same qualities as the original GeForce, but
includes some added features.
The GeForce chipset was the
first chipset to offer T&L enhancements. Also, the GeForce
was very powerful in delivering super high fill rates. The
GeForce 2 includes what nVidia refers to as their 2nd
generation GPU. What’s even more impressive is the texture
fill rate the GeForce 2 can produce. The GeForce was able to
produce 480 MTexels of fill rate. The GeForce 2 is now able to
produce 1.6 GTexels of fill rate. That’s more than three
times the texture fill rate compared to the original.
Unfortunately, the Leadtek
board and a lot of similar boards have the DDR memory clocked
only slightly higher than the original GeForce's DDR memory
clock. 333MHz compared to 300MHz. With such a high fill rate,
the memory transfers must be able to keep up, or performance
will not be at its peak potential. The Leadtek Winfast GeForce
2 shares a lot of the same features of most other GeForce 2
boards out there as it follows the reference board design. The
most noticeable physical difference that you will notice when
looking at the Leadtek board is the huge heatsink for the
GeForce 2 GTS chip.
The
GeForce 2 GTS runs a lot cooler than the burning hot original
GeForce due to the die size shrink of .22 microns to .18
microns, so the large heatsink is mostly cosmetic. It does
help keep the chip a few degrees cooler than other boards, but
that's about all the difference you will get. The Winfast
board also has onboard TV out abilities. This is though a
Chrontel 7007 TV encoder chip. This is very similar to the
Booktree encoder that's available on other boards.
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