|
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| Quality
and Installation Of The Enhanced Winfast
GeForce 2 GTS |
| Come
on in... |
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Right
out of the package it is clear that we’re not in
Kansas anymore.
As we’ve seen in the not so distant past,
manufacturers have been getting pretty creative
(and large) when it comes to cooling the latest
nVidia GPUs.
We’ve seen large fans mounted on huge
heat sinks that do an excellent job of keeping the
core cool, but does it really need to be that big?
Leadtek has asked
that same question and come up with a completely
different approach to the cooling process.
Instead of oversizing, they’ve taken a
more streamlined approach to heat dissipation.
Leadtek accomplishes this by implementing a specially designed heat
sink and the use of thermal paste where the fan blows
across the heat sink, pushing the hot air away
from the chip. This in turn helps prevent
recirculation of warm air across the processor.
With standard cooling practices, especially
in crowded cases, it is very easy for the fan to
recirculate warm air, causing the processor to run
warmer which will affect performance.
Using this design, the fan is mounted in a
position where it can draw cooler air from the
center of the case and then push the warmer air
away from the GPU.
Unfortunately,
this unique design doesn’t provide much of any
direct cooling of the onboard RAM.
What you can’t see is the back of the fan
is sealed, so the air is directed through the heat
sink.
Directly under the fan lie two of the 8 RAM
chips that get no airflow at all.
In other model cards, we’ve seen
manufacturers of similar cards put heat sinks even
on the RAM.
This is especially important when the
manufacturer encourages over-clocking, as does
Leadtek with the WinFast GeForce 2 GTS.
Now this is a choice that we would have
liked to see addressed.
During our battery of tests, the RAM did
get warm to the touch, but not hot.
We wonder just how much more we would’ve
been able to clock the RAM if some kind of cooling
was provided.
We’ll check the numbers later on…
Included
on this board are 8-8MB Samsung 333 MHz 5.5NS DDR
SGRAM.
One reason we liked this card is the increased bandwidth gained by the
use of SGRAM.
SGRAM has the added ability to open two
memory pages simultaneously that results in a
higher over all bandwidth compared to SDRAM.
That combined with the 5.5NS rate, should
result in excellent performance gains over other
cards in its class.
Curiously, though, at 5.5NS the RAM’s
default clock speed should be closer to 363 MHz.
We assume that the people at Leadtek are
allowing a little room for over-clocking.
Later on we’ll see just how much higher
we can push it beyond that 363MHz.
Another
feature is the addition of three status LED’s on
the board. I
know that they are barely visible in the image,
but they are there!
They provide monitoring to ensure that the
proper power is being supplied to the card, if the
card is running in AGP 4x mode and if there have
been any faults detected.
With the documentation provided with this
card, there is no further information as to
whether flash codes will be provided to help
determine what errors might be occurring.
During the testing of this card, we did not
encounter any errors that caused the error LED to
light up. Although
if it did, no other information is available as to
what we should do about it.
Yes, we know that we would need to check
our settings, but other than that, it really is no
help in determining what has gone wrong.
In my opinion, if Leadtek does not offer
any more information, then the error light is
merely a novelty that will wear off as soon as you
put the cover back on your case.
The
Leadtek WinFast GeForce 2 GTS comes with a
standard monitor output and an S-Video output.
Don’t worry if your still working with
RCA connectors for TV-OUT, they’ve also included
an adapter to accept an RCA connection.
Another thing we liked is that the cooling
fan is plugged into
a socket rather than soldered in like Leadtek's
older MX.
This will prove invaluable if you need to
replace the fan in the future.
I don’t know about you, but I would avoid
bringing a soldering iron near a video card that
just cost several hundred of my hard earned
dollars.
The
Drivers
and other Goodies |
