Do your eyes a favour! (Leadtek Winfast A170 DDR T)

Member Name: The Duke

Product:	Leadtek Winfast A170 DDR T
Date:	23/02/03 (1478 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Cheap, Good quality, Good performance

Disadvantages: Less advanced than other GF4 cards, Can't cope with recent games

When I was in the market last year for a new graphics card for my PC, I had been hunting around the web to see what was on offer. I had roughly £50 to spend on a new card, and I didn't know what to get as I hadn't read any of the pc magazines (and therefore not seen any recent hardware reviews).

On one of the sites, I saw a selection of GeForce 4 cards ranging from £30 up to over £100. One of these took my eye: the Leadtek WinFast A170DDRT. It was priced at £43.70 ex. VAT and it was duly purchased.

* Note that this was a year ago and these cards will now have fallen in price as newer versions have come onto the market.

The WinFast A170 DDRT is an NVIDIA GeForce 4 based card with 64mb DDR (double data rate i.e. transfers data twice as fast as ordinary memory) memory, and a TV-out socket as well. This explains the DDRT jumble of letters as part of the card name.

¤ Very brief history of graphics cards for non-techs

Years ago, when PCs were in their infancy, there were only simple graphics cards (also known as graphics adapters). These were able to produce a limited amount of colours (256 was good in those days!) and were typically good enough for basic gaming (Space Invaders!) and your normal word processing etc.

As the pc took off as a gaming machine, the hardware required also needed to evolve at the same time. Around the time when the original Quake game hit the market, dedicated 3D cards (adapters designed purely for producing 3D graphics) started to come onto the market. The early market leader was a company called 3dfx who produced a range of chips known as 'Voodoo'. Cards with these Voodoo chipsets connected to your ordinary 2d graphics card and they worked together when 3D graphics were needed. 3dfx ruled the roost for a few years with a huge market share, continually updating their chipsets (I believe the last 'proper' version was the voodoo3), and this continued until a company
called NVIDIA came along with their 'GeForce' chip which they described as a GPU (graphics processing unit - much like your PC's CPU, only dedicated to graphics.) these GeForce cards were different to the old Voodoo cards in that they were 2d/3d cards, and you only needed one to perform all graphical operations, rather than the old set up of two different cards, and this has become the standard all cards released today.

Recently, NVIDIA have had competition from other chipset manufacturers who have started to catch up and produce high quality chips which have excellent performance comparable to the GeForce cards on the market. This is good for the consumer because prices will drop as competition forces better cards onto the market.

¤ What do you get for your money?

Contained inside the box are two manuals - a quick installation guide and a more general guide for the card. These guides are not specifically for this card, but will cover all the A170 series of cards. For my particular card there were three leads, an S-video-AV cable, an ordinary AV cable, and an AV / S-video-AV adaptor which should solve any problems about connection worries. Then, you get the card itself and finally, the CD with the drivers and support software.

¤ The Card

The card was a standard size for an AGP (accelerated graphics port) graphics card, and was solidly built. The cooling fan for the GPU was metal and added a bit of weight to the card and while this doesn't affect performance of the card, it gave the card a good, solid feel to it.

¤ The Documentation

The quick installation leaflet contains enough information to install the card into your PC and install the drivers. It's very well laid out, has plenty of diagrams to help you out and the tasks that it describes are all done in a simple, logical series with relevant referrals to other documentation at the relevant times.

The General Guide
is a 60 page long, English only guide to the card and software. Most of the guide is taken up by the description of WinFox which is a piece of software to enable the user to tweak the settings of their graphics card to get better results. Also included in the guide are instructions for installing DirectX (a series of Microsoft modules which standardise how programs use the graphics and sound hardware in your computer.), updating the BIOS of the graphics card (only really used if you are a complete nerd) and a section on VIVO use (which this card isn't capable of).

¤ The Software

WinFox is a good piece of software, although only the people who want to squeeze every last piece of performance out of their system will ever really use it to its fullest extent. Most ordinary users might use it once in a while to check that their settings are ok. It's useful in that it's easy to understand where to go to do what you want to do, and would not be too confusing for less technical people.

WinFastDVD is a program which allows you to watch DVD movies on your PC (provided you have a DVDROM, of course) and has quite a lot of features. This piece of software isn't included in the manual, but is simplicity itself to use, especially if you've used DVD software before.

The drivers can be installed automatically, and use NVIDIA's own reference drivers. More than likely, the drivers on the enclosed CD will be out of date but you can download up to date ones direct from NVIDIA's site, or from Leadteks site.

DirectX8.1 is bundled with the card as well, but it has recently been superseded by DirectX9.0. You can download this from Microsoft directly if you ever need to.

¤ Card performance and specifications

It's quite hard to tell these days without throwing some really high end games at a card how it is actually performing. I'm running the card currently at 1280 x 1024 pixels at a col
our depth of 32bits (i.e. lots of colours), and everything whizzes about just fine when I'm surfing, word processing etc. even with the new, and fancy graphics effects in Windows XP. The card can use resolutions from 640 x 480 all the way up to 2048 x 1536 at 32bit colour depth (if you've got a good enough monitor!). More detailed specifications can be obtained from the Leadtek website (URL given below).

Games are no different. Recently I've been playing Grand Theft Auto 3 and No One Lives Forever 2 and the standard of graphics in these games is amazing with a graphics card powerful enough to show them off. The card was able to deal with these easily (games performance also depends on things like CPU speed, amount of memory etc.) on my system. I have given brief details of my PC below to use as a reference.

One minor point is my DVD playback performance. Sometimes, the DVD seems to skip a bit (i.e. one frame is held on screen for a second or so, and then the film continues as normal), but I haven't identified this as a graphics card problem yet, and I suspect might actually be a DVD ROM problem.

¤ Overall

So, it's about 40% of the price of a high end GeForce 4 card with all the bells and whistles, but I really don't play enough brand new games to be able to justify that amount of cash. However, I regularly have two or three different programs running at once, and with a high resolution screen, things are made much easier and clearer. I'm quite pleased with this card, especially at the price and would have no hesitation in recommending it to anyone looking to upgrade their own graphics adapters. It's also worth noting that if you do play a lot of the newer games on the market then this card probably isn't for you. The 440MX versions of the GeForce 4 cards are supposedly no more technologically advanced than older versions of GeForce video cards with their speed pumped up to give better perfor
mance. If you're trying to play the likes of Deus Ex: Invisible War, then you'd be better off saving a few extra pounds and going for something more recent with a bit more kick to it.

One final point, in case there is any confusion. The TV out socket is so you can use your TV as a monitor (for example, playing games). This is useful if you currently have a small monitor. The TV socket does not enable you to watch TV on your PC.

¤ System requirements:

AGP compatible motherboard (most are these days, but check with your motherboard manual just to be sure)
Any Windows operating system from Windows98 onward (98, ME, NT4.0 [with SP6], 2000 or XP)
CDROM for installing software (although you could just download it from the internet)

¤ Using my PC as a comparison (note only relevant components are listed).

Operating System: Windows XP Service Pack 1
Memory: 704 MB
CPU: AMD Duron 1.4 GHz
Motherboard: ABit KT7E
Monitor: 19" CTX

¤ Support
Leadteks website is at:
http://www.leadtek.co.uk

NVIDIA can be found at:
http://www.nvidia.com/

Microsoft can be found at:
http://www.microsoft.com

Summary: