32MB GTS - a fast, reliable card for any game (Guillemot 3D Prophet II GTS)

Member Name: Bezuk

Product:	Guillemot 3D Prophet II GTS
Date:	14/06/01 (164 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Raw power is excellent, Great drivers and support, Highly reliable, with good overclocking possibilities

Disadvantages: High price compared to rivals, FSAA implementation not great, No bundled games

When I bought my 3D Prophet II GTS 32MB last August, it cost me £250 and for that, I expected to be blown away by its performance, and I was. It’s a seriously powerful card. Nowadays, though, it’s certainly not king of the hill, with the GTS Ultra and GeForce3 outperforming it, but those are £350-£400 cards even today. I think the GTS is an excellent card for modern gaming.

Today, I think you’d have problems finding a 32MB GTS for sale, but I think you could get a 64MB GTS for about £140-£170. The GTS’s nearest competitor from a different brand is ATI’s Radeon. The Radeon 64MB DDR costs about £130. So I suppose the point of this review is: why buy a GTS over a Radeon?

The Radeon has a couple of things over the GTS. Firstly, it has the edge on price, and secondly, its handling of 32bit colour is better than the GTS. I’ve heard many people say that the Radeon has ‘better image quality’ than nVidia cards, but I can’t see any evidence of this. My cousin’s PC has a Radeon in it, and when I run games on that I don’t notice the quality being any higher.

The GTS has two major advantages. Firstly, the raw power of the GTS exceeds the Radeon by quite a way. NVidia cards are famous for pushing a lot of pixels around very fast. So, in most resolutions and colour depths, it’s going to give more FPS. Secondly and most critically is driver support. Graphics drivers provided by nVidia are very well made, updated regularly, and allow the maximum possible performance from the card. With the aid of a third-party optimisation utility such as NVMax (http://www.nvmax.com) you can get a much bigger speed boost (or quality boost) than you’d think.

The GTS’ sibling lower down the nVidia product line is the GeForce2 MX. The GTS and the MX are very similar cards, and there is quite a price difference between them, so many people are now choosing the MX over the GTS. When I b
ought the GTS, the MX didn’t exist, so I didn’t have to choose, but the GTS does offer that bit more power than the MX, having four rendering pipelines instead of 2. As far as reliability goes, the GTS for me has been excellent. I don’t think its ever failed to run a game. Installation was also a simple and hassle-free experience

Spec-wise, the GTS cards are excellent, having 32 or 64MB DDR memory running on a 128-bit bus, giving the RAM a lot of bandwidth. For overclockers, GTS and particularly Guillemot / Hercules cards are very good, having both passive and active cooling on the core as well as RAM heatsinks. This means you could probably overclock the core and RAM quite a bit, though I have not tried this. The GeForce2 also has a moderate implementation of Full-Scene Anti-Aliasing, although the card is not really powerful enough to pull this off in a decent resolution with a decent framerate.

It doesn't come with any games, but does come with a full version of popular DVD sofware, PowerDVD.

I think the best overall opinion I can give of this card is this: I can run any modern, graphic-intensive PC game in 1024x768x32 with all detail settings usually maxed, with no or virtually no slowdown. Having said that, so can the GeForce2 MX...

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