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Posted by
Julio
Franco on October 25, 2001
Manufacturer: Visiontek
Product: Xtasy
6964 GeForce 3 Titanium 500
Out
of the Box – The Xtasy 6964 Ti 500
After
taking the card out of the box I was delighted to inspect
it, first thing you will notice, the card ships with a blue
HSF and RAM heat sinks which gives the card a cool
appearance. Another of the things you will notice
immediately is that the card comes equipped with a TV-out
and Digital output connector along with the standard VGA
output.
The
rest of the box was “filled” with a couple of CDs and a
quick installation manual, actually a big paper with some
basic instructions and Visiontek’s generous Lifetime
warranty disclaimer.
I
guess Visiontek could have easily shipped the card in a
smaller box like Matrox did with the G450 since most of the
box was empty. On
the CDs we found the drivers, some GeForce 3 technology
demos, a huge videocard FAQ and a video illustrating how a
videocard should be installed. I guess that was their way of
complementing the poor printed documentation found in the
box.
A
second CD contained PowerDVD software, and that’s about it
for Xtasy’s 6964 software bundle. Considering this is a
relatively expensive card I would have expected at least
some OEM game bundle, but I guess Visiontek preferred to
keep production costs as low as possible.
Update:
One reader pointed that the second CD I got (PowerDVD) isn't
actually part of Xtasy's 6964 bundle, according to Visiontek
they supplied us, reviewers, with one copy of the program to
test card's DVD playback capabilities. Although things don't
change much, it's a shame Visiontek couldn't include a more
generous bundle with their high-end videocard (thanks
Stephen).
The
installation of the card was completely painless even under
Windows XP. I had a GeForce 2 Ultra videocard installed
before with some old Detonator drivers that didn’t
recognize the Titanium card right from scratch. I had
already downloaded NVIDIA’s latest 21.83 drivers but I
noticed the drivers on the CD were version 21.85 and had a
more recent date, so I used those instead. I was told these
yet unreleased drivers fix some visual bugs.
The
card was default clocked at 240 MHz for the core and 250 MHz
DDR (500 MHz effective) for the memory, that’s Titanium
500 default setting, a reasonable improvement over original
GeForce3's clock of 200/460 (core/memory) and Ti 200’s
175/400 DDR setting.
I
took out the smaller heatsinks installed on the RAM for a
quick inspection and noticed this Xtasy board has been
equipped with 3.8ns memory, in theory this should give us
some room for overclocking… 3.8ns = 263 MHz DDR = 526
effective MHz vs. 500 MHz (default setting).
Now,
about the drivers, Visiontek didn’t bother to brand the
drivers, although the CD is printed and labeled accordingly
(like any other retail product), the drivers contained in it
are pure reference drivers from NVIDIA. There shouldn’t be
a problem with these given that the card is practically
identical to the reference boards.
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