|
Please take note of the hardware
used in our reference system. Both cards were tested
on a fresh installation of Windows XP.
 |
| HotHardware's Test System |
|
An AMD Athlon
Machine |
|
Common
Hardware:
1.4GHz AMD Athlon
(Thunderbird)
Epox 8K7A+ AMD 761 / VIA 686B
Hybrid (Latest BIOS)
2568MB Corsair PC2400
(8-8-8-2-5-2-2)
3COM 3C905-TX NIC
Hercules Game Theater XP
IBM 7200RPM 30GB HD x (2) -
RAID 0
Plextor UltraPlex 40Max
Adaptec AHA-2940 UWPro
Standard Floppy Drive
Via 4-in-1s v.4.33V
AMD Chipset Drivers (AGP
Miniport v5.22)
Operating
Systems / Software:
Windows XP Professional
DirectX 8.1
Video Cards:
NVIDIA Reference GeForce 3
Ti500
Leadtek WinFast GeForce 3 Ti500 TD
Video
Drivers:
nVidia Reference Drivers
v21.85
 |
| Benchmarks - Video 2000 |
|
MadOnion's Video
Test |
|
Before we get into
the benchmarks, I want to briefly talk about 2D image
quality, compatibility and stability. We used a
Mitsubishi 22" 2040U monitor for testing, a very high
quality CRT that reveals the tiniest blemish. At all
desktop resolutions up to 1600x1200, 2D image quality was
excellent. If you enable "Digital Vibrance", colors are
very rich, with good contrast. Once we surpassed the 1600x1200 mark
though, we could see slight blurriness with on-screen text,
but it was tolerable. This shouldn't be an issue for
most users, considering how few people use this desktop
resolution. Hopefully we'll be seeing some higher
speed RAMDACs with future NVIDIA chipsets (like the ones ATi use) to
eliminate this drawback.
Once we upgraded to
the 21.85 detonators, we had absolutely no problems with
compatibility or stability to report with the WinFast GF3 Ti500
TD.
With the exception of the annoying DLL error we had with the
included drivers, this card was absolutely "bug free"
What do you say we get started on the benchmarks?
First up we have
MadOnion's
Video 2000, which is designed to evaluate the video
playback quality, performance and video features available
in modern graphics adapters.
VIDEO 2000:
This score is on par with all
other GeForce 3 based cards we have tested. Until
specific architectural and driver enhancements are made to
improve video playback, these numbers probably won't change
much.
 |
| Benchmarks - 3DMark 2001 -
DirectX 8 |
|
MadOnion's Finest
"Gaming" Benchmark |
|
Next up we have another of
MadOnion's products, the DirectX 8 benchmark 3D Mark 2001.
For the remainder of this review, we'll be comparing the
Leadtek WinFast GF3 Ti500 TD's performance to the
NVIDIA Reference board we evaluated a few weeks back.
3D MARK 2001:
Across the board we saw
excellent 3D Mark 2001 scores with the Leadtek WinFast GF3
Ti500 TD, it managed to outpace NVIDIA's reference board in
every resolution...albeit by the slightest of margins.
We ran the same set of tests on
the WinFast Ti500 TD while we overclocked the card to 266MHz.
core / 571MHz. (DDR) memory.
The marked increases in core and
memory clockspeed showed measurable performance gains at all
resolutions.
.gif)
More
3D Mark 2001, Max and some Quake |
