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The
Gigabyte GA660Plus - TNT2-A
What
a difference a "rev." makes!
Most
companies dealing with circuit board design and manufacturing go
through a refinement process of their product which makes
improvements to the original release product with each iteration.
Gigabyte had a little help from NVidia, the manufacturers of the
TNT2 chip, on this revision. The GA660Plus is the identical board
design and layout of the original GA660, with one exception. This
board is populated with the all new NVidia TNT2-A, a .22 Micron
version of the TNT2, which was originally fab'ed using .25 Micron
technology. We all know what that means...
Smaller
Die Size = Lower Power Consumption+Less Heat+ Higher Core Frequency
We
like that equation...
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Click
here...
 
Hmm, those pics
are vaguely familiar. Perhaps that is because the GA660 and GA660
Plus look exactly the same with the exception of the
"Plus" on the board marking. Just make sure if you buy
one, that the silk screen markings say "Plus" next to the
GA660. Also, the rev of the first GA660 board is 1.3. A Plus board
will have a 1.4 Rev. on it. Other than that, only a few key
parameters have changed, namely SPEED! (Our favorite word)
The same
excellent high performance cooling aproach is used on the GA660Plus
as was used on the original design. Gigabyte installs a heatsink and
fan combo on the front and a nice heatsink on the back of the board
as well. This TNT2 "sandwich" keeps things really cool
under pressure and lets the clock frequencies crank! Let's look at
the rest of the criticals.
NVIDIA
RIVA TNT2-A, 2D/3D Graphics Processor
- 128-bit
TwiN-Texel (TNT) architecture
- 32/16MB frame
buffer with 128-bit interface
- AGP 4X/2X/1X
interface with sideband addressing
- 300MHz RAMDAC
Graphics
Controller: NVIDIA RIVA TNT2-A at 149MHz
or 170MHz Turbo Mode
Memory: 32MB 6ns SDRAM at 166MHz
or 180MHz Turbo Mode
- Single-pass
multi-texturing
- 32-bit true
color rendering
- Per-pixel
MIP-mapping
- Optimized for
Direct3D acceleration
ADVANCED
3D FEATURES
- Hardware
triangle setup engine
- Optimized for
Direct3D acceleration
- Complete
DirectX 6.X support
- TwiN-Texel
(TNT) 32-bit graphics pipeline
- 2
texture-mapped, lit pixels per clock
- Single pass
multi-texturing
- Square and
non-square texture support
- Texture
blending support, including:
- Multi-textures,
bump maps, texture modulation, Light maps, reflection maps,
environmental maps
- Procedural
textures
- Back end
blending, including: DirectX 6.X: 121 modes supported for
source, destination and alpha blending
- 32-bit ARGB
rendering with destination alpha
- Point
sampled, bilinear, trilinear, and 8-tap anisotropic filtering
(better than trilinear mip-mapping)
- Per-pixel,
perspective-correct, texture mapping, including fog, light, mip
mapping
- 24-bit or
16-bit Z-buffer and 8-bit stencil buffer
- Anti-aliasing
(full scene and order independent)
2D
ACCELERATION
- 128-bit
graphics engine, optimized for single cycle operation
- Internal
256-bit data paths for high speed Windows acceleration
- Pipeline
optimized for multiple color depths
- Execution of
all 256 raster operations
- Multi-buffering
(double, triple, and quad) for smooth animation
- True color
hardware cursor
VIDEO
ACCELERATION
- Acceleration
of full-motion video playback, sustaining 30 frames per second
with high quality color resolution
- Implements
true bilinear filtering for scaled video
- Backend
hardware video scaling for video conferencing and playback
- Hardware
color space conversion and multi-tap X and Y filtering
- Support for
scaled field interframing
- Per-pixel
color keying
- Multiple
video windows with hardware color space conversion and filtering
- Support for
software MPEG acceleration and H.261 video conferencing
- DVD
sub-picture alpha blending compositing
- Video
acceleration for DirectShow, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, and Indeo
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