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Posted by
Toby Crundwell
on September 07, 2001
Manufacturer: OCZ Technology
Product: Titan
2 Ultra SE
Impressions
Apart from the extravagant heatsinks I
mentioned earlier, the Titan is somewhat unremarkable. The
green PCB is as expected and the dimensions are roughly
similar to other GeForce cards. Not diminutive in any way,
but not so large as to pose a problem installing it into any
case. The bugbear I have with this card is the fact it takes
up two slots. Users of smaller motherboards with five or
less PCI slots (such as myself) may soon find they have no
room for expansion once installing this card. Once I had
removed a card from PCI slot #1, I was clear to slide in the
titan. The fan from the Blue orb is not plugged in to the
card by default. In fact this is a good idea on the part of
OCZ as it reduces the stability by adding even more current
requirement to an already power hungry card (more on the
power requirements later).
The Titan shipped in a small
American-mail package with an antistatic bag, quite similar
to any other OEM board. The remarkable thing about it was
that it only took five days to ship all the way to the UK
from ID, US.
Installation
For the most part, installation of the
Titan was painless; the only moment of grief it gave me was
forcing me to remove an old radio card that was located in
PCI slot #1 in order to make way for the Large Blue Orb.
Windows booted up to install them again for me for this new
card. The installation was still painless with the latest
non customized detonators. Once installed, I plugged the fan
into a spare three-pin connector. Additionally I could have
used the three to five pin adapter that OCZ supplied.
However, once the drivers were installed
windows started exhibiting major graphical anomalies in 2D,
usually involving purple pixels. The effect was more visible
in Widows 98 than Windows 2000, but nonetheless was very
annoying in both operating systems. I ruled out overheating
by a quick probing of the heatsinks, but then ASUS probe
informed me that the voltage supply to my processor was
dropping. This was one power hungry card! This card should
only be used with a powerful PSU. I would not recommend
using this card on a Gigabyte motherboard either, as they
are renowned for poor current across the AGP slot.
The Titan operated flawlessly in AGP 4x
with fast writes, side band addressing and USWC memory
caching, and was even willing to run at an increased AGP bus
speed of 80 MHz, without making the system instable. It's a
truly card for overclockers.
Miscellaneous information
As I mentioned earlier, the Titan did
not come with any software. Resorting to WinDVD, playback
was revealed as smooth as any other GeForce card can be
expected to be, with no obvious visual anomalies, although
this card was not principally designed as a DVD solution
The Titan family of cards are made in
cooperation with 3D
Chipset. The manner of their input on the cards is not
clear; but its 3D chipset who provide the drivers for the
Titan cards. The drivers are not ordinary detonators and the
ones I tried (12.90) seemed considerably faster than the
official 12.40 detonators that windows installed by default.
I
was quite intrigued as to what OCZ had done to give the
“enhanced 2D quality” (or more specifically improved RFI
filtering) the titan is marketed with. Perhaps OCZ carried
out the fix that one of our forum regulars suggested here,
which is quite possible. The 2D quality was noticeably
different in “normal” resolutions of 1024x768 &
1280x1024, but no image degradation was present at 1600x1200
& 1920x1440. Unfortunately my Hansol 710P only refreshes
at 60Hz at the latter resolution, so testing was a little
difficult.
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