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

Benchmarks With The Siluro GF256 GTS The RIGHT way to run nVidia based FSAA

Quake 3 Time Demo With FSAA

Now, that's more like it.  Even at 1024X768X32, with FSAA turned on, the game is still playable.  We are well into Voodoo5 territory here with these numbers.  Running FSAA on a 32MB GeForce2 card is almost pointless, in our opinion, because the performance drop is not worth the slightly better image quality.  Again, the image quality is roughly on par with Voodoo5's 2X FSAA and these scores on the Siluro 64MB card, put it just slightly behind it, from a frame rate standpoint.  You'll also notice, we were able to actually run at 1600X1200 with FSAA on the Siluro, something you cannot do on the Voodoo5 as it runs out of memory space.  However, at 13.6 fps, it is a beautiful slide show but not playable, obviously.

This is the kind of performance we are shooting for with FSAA enabled.  At 1024X768X32, things are very smooth at 44.5 fps.  At 800X600X32, you can easily get into a heated Multi-Player Match and still have a frame rate advantage over most folks.  Once again, the Siluro GF256 GTS is able to raise the bar with its over-clocking prowess. Overall these scores we have posted, are the fastest we have produced to date in house.  Great work Abit!

The Abit Siluro GF256 GTS 64 is the fastest GeForce2 card we have tested to date.  The drivers included are a little dated but that won't stop most folks from using the nVidia reference drivers.  At a price tag of around $330 for most 64MB cards, you'll have to justify the roughly $80 differential versus a 32MB card.  We should also mention that the Siluro GF256 GTS is only available in a 64MB flavor. 

However, if you are serious about FSAA and want the ability to hit new levels in frame rate, a 64MB card is the only way to go.  You can expect to gain 10-15% in performance in the higher resolutions and significantly more with FSAA enabled.  Finally, the over-clocking potential in this card is enormous.  You can also expect to gain upwards of another 15% performance boost, should you be lucky enough to get a card that could hold up the way ours did during testing.

We are giving the Abit Siluro GF256 GTS 64 a HotHardware Heat Meter rating of....

Got something meaningful to say or do you just want to flap your gums?
Get into the HotHardware Conference Room today!

  To HotHardware!