|
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 |