Be careful buying Geforce 3 cards (Leadtek Winfast GeForce3 TD)

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Product:	Leadtek Winfast GeForce3 TD
Date:	23/01/02 (173 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Very fast , plus good bundle, FSAA is at last working well, Games now support GF3 features

Disadvantages: is 30% faster worth £290, Confusion over GF3 and Ti cards

My PC sits way above "minimum" or even "recommended" specification for all of the games on the market at the moment. But as any "hardcore" games player will tell you, it's all about constant upgrading.

In the past year, my motherboard, processor, memory, hard drive and case have all fallen prey to the upgrade bug, whilst I have been through 3 graphics cards in the past year alone..Luckily, upgrading decent kit to even more high spec kit isn't too expensive as you can get good cash or exchange prices for many of these parts at computer exchange stores. I also found several friends willing to pay cash for second-hand parts, all of
which still had 8 months of guarantee left.

After all this upgrading, I'm left with an Athlon 1.2ghz running on the superb Abit KG-7 Lite board with 512mb of Crucial pc-2100 DDR and a Geforce 2 Ultra graphics card. A week ago, I thought that would be enough for a long time.

However, whilst playing the excellent single-player demo of "Medal of Honour : Allied Assault", I was unhappy with the lack of anti-aliasing, which was making all the trees look really "bitty" and "pixelated". And then I got a new copy of Pc Gamer, and there were several articles about new PC games like "Unreal Tournament 2", "Unreal 2" and so on, all of which have features written for Geforce 3 graphics cards.

I had been looking at this expensive upgrade in two ways

1) upgrade to Geforce 3
2) Keep the 2 Ultra and buy X-box console

Both upgrades cost the same, although x-box games are £40-50, extra controllers £30 so it would cost more. But, seeing all these cool games coming out for PC, I was happy to upgrade my graphics card, and wait until Christmas or maybe New Year for X-Box. By then it could be cheaper, and will have more games than the 10 or so launch games that reach the UK for the 14 March launch.

Som
ething I have found about the upgrading path is that you can't leave it too long otherwise your parts don't attract a good trade-in value. As an example, I got my Geforce 2 Ultra for £220 at Computer Exchange in London. I had traded in my Geforce 2 GTS and got about £120, so £100 wasn't bad to pay for the Ultra. When I came to trade my Ultra yesterday, they are now selling at £160, so I got £108 in cash. Things move so quickly that prices always tumble when new, faster cards come onto the market.

Overall, I had been pretty happy with my Geforce 2 Ultra, it was a fast card that could hold it's own against most cards. One problem was that switching on Anti-aliasing would severely impact the performance, and even then the maximum AA rate was 3 sample rather than the Geforce 3 or Radeon 8500's Quincunx mode (4x AA). Also, both those cards are designed to use AA without having massive impact on framerates.

There is alot of confusion on the market about Geforce 3 cards. The Geforce 3 came out, and was followed two months later by a range of cards labelled "Titanium". These new cards were available in 3 flavours

Geforce 2 Titanium
Geforce 3 Titanium-200
Geforce 3 Titanium-500

The 2 Ti replaces the Geforce 2 Ultra, although it is a little slower than the Ultra due to lower clock speeds.

The 3 Ti-200 replaces the Geforce 3, although the Ti-200 is actually slower than original GF3 due to 175mhz core speed in contrast to the Geforce 3's 200mhz core speed.

The 3 Ti-500 is the fastest of all these cards, with 240mhz core/500mhz memory speeds and was the one I wanted.

I took a trip down Tottenham Court Road in London and visited a dozen computer stores to get a price. There were plenty of Ti-200 cards kicking about, but few Ti-500's. I went to my favourite store, and they told me they had a Ti-500 for £290 cash. That seemed a reasonable price, so I parted with the mone
y and went home.

I was puzzled by the lack of reference on the box to ti-500, just "Geforce 3 TDH", from Leadtek. My Geforce 2 Ultra had been a Leadtek card, and had been great (nice build quality, big fan and heatsinks) so I wasn't too worried.

Installation was easy, and I loaded Leadtek's software suite which includes the video drivers and Winfox card utilities.

I tested the new card using 3D Mark 2001, a great benchmarking program that now boasts specific Geforce 3 features like pixel and vertex shading tests.

The results are below:

3D Mark 2001

1024 x 768 x 32bit x 24bit z buffer x no AA

Geforce 2 Ultra 4509
Geforce 3 5574
Geforce 3 O'c 6006

1280 x 1024 x 32bit x 24bit z buffer x 3 sample AA

Geforce 2 Ultra 1973 (2 sample AA)
Geforce 3 2436 (3 sample AA)
Geforce 3 O'c 2781

You can see quite a big difference in the figures, the 3 is 1038 3D marks faster than the 2 Ultra, but this is more noticeable when you implement Anti-aliasing, or jump to higher resolutions.

The 2 Ultra would not run at 1280x1024 with 3 sample AA, only 2 sample. The 3 was happy running either 3 or 4 (quincunx) samples at this resolution

The O'c figure for the Geforce 3 relates to overclocking, which is as follows:

Geforce 3 core clock - 200 mhz
Geforce 3 memory clock - 458 mhz

GF3 core o'c - 240 mhz
GF3 Mem o'c - 509 mhz

I could have O'c it higher but didn't want to fry my new card, not yet anyhow!

The overclocking was easy with a special utility within Winfox, and the core clock will go up to 350mhz, and the memory clock to 600mhz as long as your system remains stable.

After checking out my new card on the internet, I found out I had been sold a Geforce 3, and not a Geforce 3 Ti-500. I rang the store, spoke to the boss and he's
arranged an ASUS Ti-500 for this afternoon.

The Ti-500 differs to the standard GF3 in that the core and memory clock speeds are 20% higher, it has faster memory, higher bandwidth (8GB/sec instead of 7.2GB/sec), lower power consumption and a new 8 layer printed circuit board. You can make up the difference in clock speed between GF3 and GF3 ti-500 by slight overclocking, but this places more heat stress on the card. The Ti-500 was designed to run faster, and so features a redesigned PCB, heatsink and fan.

Although the GF3 is a great card, I paid for a GF3 Ti-500 and that is what I want! I have just been told that the Ti-500 is no longer available, they have new (GF 4) cards out in the next few weeks, these will cost considerably more (128mb video ram!!) and won't be supported by games for at least another year, so I'll stick with the GF3 solution for now..

Overall, a useful jump in speed, and the ability to implement full screen anti-aliasing without impacting performance too much.

There is little software on the market that exploits the GF3's new features, one game is Dronez which is bundled with the card, you also get Windvd and Rebellion's "Gunlok" game. However, many new games, out this year, will support the new Direct X 8.1 feature set, something that the 2 Ultra did not support. Many of these features relate to high-level detail such as being able to accurately simulate fur, feathers, water, etc.

Note: The card has tv-out and DVI output in addition to the normal D-pin monitor connector. The tv-out quality is ok, not as good as Radeons but acceptable.

DRIVER NOTES:

You get an older Nvidia driver with the bundle. I tested it using 3d mark, and it gave the figures seen above. I then tried using the new Nvidia Detonator XP driver for Win 9XX and 3D Mark showed a decrease in performance, which is quite common with Beta drivers. I reinstalled the bundled driver and performa
nce increased. If you use Nvidia's own XP driver, you'll need to install a Geforce control programe otherwise you have no control over the settings. You can't use "Geforce Tweak" as this doesn't work with GF3 cards.

It's alot of money to pay for a small increase in performance, but it's nice to have the best, and it gives a good degree of future-proofing for maybe 2 years of games to come. When the new games arrive this year, the GF3 cards will finally come of age and that money will be well spent.

If you are looking for a new video card, it may be worth waiting a few weeks and seeing what happens with the GF4?

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