Leadtek Winfast GeForce 3 TD Review - By Mark "Frugal" Bush Page 1 of 2
It has been said that if you have seen one GeForce 3 then you’ve seen them all. This is because most companies do not deviate far from the Nvidia reference design when creating their video cards. Leadtek have stuck fairly close to the reference design for the most part, however they have made a few little changes that set this board apart from other GeForce 3 boards. As well as the standard S-Video TV out they have also included a Conexant socket. This actually allows output to a TV at 1024 x 768. Leadtek say in the literature that it is capable of TV out at up to 800 x 600 so at least in this area they are certainly under-promising and over-delivering. They have also included DVI output for digital lcd flat panel displays. It also has a very big heat-sink covering the chips for better cooling. All the required leads for TV out are included and the card comes with the following software bundle.
l Drivers (and Winfox utility)
l WinFastDVD
l Colorific
l 3Deep
l True Internet Color
l Cult 3D
Let’s have a look at the features as advertised on Leadteks site.
Hardware Features
l Third Generation NVIDIA GeForce3 nFiniteFX GPU
l On Board 64MB -4ns DDR Memory
l LightSpeed Memory Architecture
l 3.2 billion AA samples per sec fill rate
l 7.36GB/sec memory bandwidth
l High-Performance Hardware Anti-Aliasing
l 350 MHz RAMDAC
l DVD software included
l AGP 4X/2X, AGP texturing and Fast Write supports
l Microsoft DirectX 8 and OpenGL 1.2 Optimizations and support
l Programmable Vertex Shader
l on-board DVI-I support
l Second Generation Integrated Transform and Lighting (T&L) Engines
l Drivers Support for Win 9X, Win ME, Win NT4, Win2K
l Leadtek WinFox system utility
Leadtek Value-Added features
l 64MB 4ns Memory onboard
l Support TV-out
l Special Designed Active Cooling Module for GPU and Memory
l On board DVI-I connector
Installation
Installation of the hardware was a breeze. The documentation supplied with the Leadtek GeForce 3 is pretty good. As per the included instructions I reverted back to the standard VGA drivers before shutting down my machine and swapping out the old card in favour of the new. The GeForce 3 is a nice compact card and so fitted in my case without any problems at all. On powering up I just placed the CD in the drive, selected driver install and followed the on screen prompts.
The supplied drivers and included Winfox utility have a lot of nice features including an over-clocking tool, unfortunately Falcon 4 did not like these drivers so out they came. The next few days was spent installing driver after driver. This brings me to my major gripe about this card. There are just too many drivers on the net for this card and it can be an absolute nightmare to find the best driver for your needs. For instance the best drivers I found for Falcon 4 were the 7.97’s but they didn’t allow hardware T&L in Typhoon. The 10.80’s allowed hardware T&L in Typhoon but lost FSAA in Falcon 4 when you used A2G radar. The 12.41’s performed well in Typhoon but average in F4 and messed up the A2G radar. The 12.90’s were ok in both Falcon 4 and Typhoon but played up in another game and so it went on. I can live with this, I'm used clearing windows of all driver remnants, files etc and experimenting with different revisions. I train people to give tech support and so am used to farting around with this stuff. Now imagine poor old Joe public, just got his very expensive purchase home and fitted it. Assuming we only want to go back as far as the 6.50's we have 34 driver revisions to choose from. Each with varying issues dependent on the particular games you play. Ask on most forums "what is the best driver for X game" and you will get a multitude of answers ranging from the 6.50's to the 14.40's. If you are playing Opengl games like Quake 3 then you will be as happy as Larry with this card with pretty much any driver you choose. For DX games it's more a case of pot luck. This is something nvidia really need to sort out. Either release a mature driver or stop leaking betas.
Of course what you really want to know is how well does the card perform in sims? If you are expecting lots of 3dmarks in this review then you have come to the wrong place, I played with 3dmark2001 for some time and concluded that it was a pretty boring game. Benchmarks only serve a useful purpose when you are comparing cards. To be quite honest I've never been a real fan of synthetic benchmarks, they are a red herring.
I have only 3 criterion by which I judge a video card.
1. Does it run my games at an acceptable speed
2. Do my games look really good with this card
3. Am I happy that I got this card.
Rather than look at these 3 now I will talk a little about the key features and how they affect the games I play, then we'll see how the card stands up.
