The Siluro GF256 GTS 64MB DDR
More highly "over-clockable" hardware from Abit

By Dave "Davo" Altavilla
8/9/00

 

H.H. Test System
Built for comfort and speed

LiteOn Mid Tower ATX Case w/ 300W PS, Pentium III 866EB,  Abit SE6 i815 Motherboard and Abit Siluro GF256 GTS 64MB AGP Card, 128MB of PC133 True CAS2 SDRAM from Corsair (thanks Outside Loop), IBM 15Gig 7200 RPM ATA100 Hard Drives (thanks again Outside Loop), Kenwood 72X CDROM,
Win 98SE, DirectX 7.0a, nVidia reference drivers version 5.32

Overclocking The Abit Siluro GF256 GTS 64
What Abit does best

As the saying goes, "consider the source".  Abit has a long history of producing high quality products with the Over-clocker in mind.  The Siluro GF256 GTS is cut from the same cloth and that is where it shines.  Let's show you what tricks we could pull with the Siluro.

Defying the laws of physics - Click here

We were floored to see that the Siluro GF256 GTS, could handle a clock speed of 405MHz. DDR on the memory interface.  Again, the Hyundai chips that are on this board are rated at 166MHz. SDR and 333MHz. DDR.  At 405MHz., we are talking about a 202.5 MHz. SDR clock speed and that is a lot of guard band that is built into these SDRAM chips.  Furthermore, as we all know by now, the GeForce product line has always suffered from lack of sufficient memory bandwidth.  As a result, this speed boost should prove very performance enhancing.

Finally, at these clock speeds, 235MHz. Core and 405MHz. Memory, the card was completely stable and we saw no visual artifacts.  This may or may not be true for all Siluro cards.  As you know, this is not an exact science.  However, the likelihood is good that you will experience the same kind of results.  Also, we were able to over-clock the memory to 420MHz. (the max end of the slider) and the card would run through a round of benchmarks fine.  However, after extended testing at this speed, the card would seem to reset itself (on the fly mind you) to a much lower clock speed and the benchmarks would actually run quite slowly.  We are not sure if there is some sort of "protection" mechanism built into the card but we have asked Abit to look into this and we will report back to you. 

It is time to show you what this speed demon can do, so without further delay...

Benchmarks With The Siluro GF256 GTS
Raising the bar...

First, let's get a baseline with 3DMark 2000 from MadOnion.

3DMark 2000 Tests

At default speed, we are looking at very good scores.  These are a notch higher than what we saw in our Elsa Gladiac 32 Review but remember the Siluro is a 64MB card, so you get what you pay for.

Unreal Tournament Timdemo Tests

Once again, these scores are a notch above what a 32MB card can turn out in UT.  With respect to FSAA, UT really isn't playbable beyond 1024X768 in 16 bit color with 4X FSAA.  However, 800X600X32 was pretty sweet indeed with the "jaggies" minimized.  If you are wondering about 2X FSAA scores here, we didn't see much of a benefit visually with UT at that setting, so we didn't bother to run the numbers. 

We did run a few other numbers though...

Over-clocked Scores, Q3A and MDK2