Gigabyte's GA-GF2560 SDR GeForce
Get overclocked and ready to rock!

Full Tower ATX Case w/ 300W PS, Pentium3-500E (Provided By OutsideLoop Computers) overclocked to 750MHz., Tyan Trinity 400 VIA Apollo Pro 133A Motherboard and Soyo SY-6BA+IV BX Motherboard 128MB of EMS PC133 HSDRAM, WD 18G 7200RPM DMA66 Hard Drive, Gigabyte GA-GF2560 - 32MB SDR GeForce AGP Graphics Card , Sound Blaster Live value, Kenwood 72X CDROM, Win 98SE, DirectX7, NVidia Refernce Drivers Build 3.68 and 5.08

As you will note in the test system specs, we used both a VIA Apollo Pro133A board and also performed a batch of Quake 3 Timedemo runs on an Intel BX board.  This should give you an idea of the relative performance of both platforms and the benefits of a highly overclocked AGP Bus on the BX board, should you be able to achieve it, as we did in the test.  On with the show!

3D Mark 2000 - By Mad Onion

Click for full view

 

Video2000 - By Mad Onion

These tests were done at the default core and clock speed of the board (120/166) using the NVidia 3.68 drivers on the VIA Apollo Pro133A based system.  No surprises again here, just great GeForce performance in both tests.  The Video2000 tests show the GeForce to be a competent performer.  It should give you the ability to play DVDs with good frame rate on mid range to high end systems.

Quake 3 Arena Timedemo

Click images for full view of both 16 and 32 Bit Color Performance

There are a couple of things you will not in these tests.  With the BX Test Bed, we were only tested up to 1024X768 in both Color Depths.  Why?  Because we were getting punchy quite frankly, from all the benchmarking ( each test run three times for verification) and 1600X1200 is not all that playble for any board in Quake 3. 

However, just for giggles, we decided to throw in a few scores on the VIA setup while overclocked and running the NVidia 5.08 drivers (no the 5.13 drivers were not available at the time of these tests).  Consider this a bonus!  :)  This should give you an idea of what some serious tweaking can bring you with this board.  With these drivers you can enable FSAA (Full Scene Anti-Aliasing) with the GeForce but you would want to play that way.  The frame rate slows to a crawl.  NVidia needs to work on this one and these drivers are not "officially" released or supported.  As a result, you can't expect things to be optimized.   Can you say NV15?  :)

Finally, we were VERY impressed by the scores of this board while heavily overclocked at 155/190.  These numbers put it in the ballpark of a DDR card.  Sure, a DDR GeForce still beats the above scores handily but for an SDR card, you can't go wrong with this kind of performance.

Here are a few scores from that D3D infused CPU hog of a game, Unreal Tournament. 

Don't get me wrong, UT is a great game and looks gorgeous but what a frame rate crusher!  Never the less, great scores were turned in by the GA-GF2560

Hot Stuff?  We think so!

Gigabyte has once again delivered a product that goes above and beyond the call of duty with respect to quality and performance.  We would have liked more up to date drivers with more features as well as full licensed DVD software but the bundle was adequate.  All told, the GA-GF2560 delivers powerful performance within the GeForce SDR Graphics arena.  Availability of the product on line is spotty but if you are able to find one, it is sure to be cost competitive as have previous Gigabyte/NVidia based products.  The only reason we didn't give this card a perfect score was the slightly light offering on the software side of the product.  Regardless, this product is indeed, HotHardware.

We give the Gigabyte GA-GF2560 a Hot Hardware Heat Meter Rating of