SUMMARY: The GeForce3 has been hitting the streets in force lately, and our very own Jon "Albinus" Albiez wants to tell you all about the newest video monster from Leadtek. So fasten your seatbelts and get ready to take a ride on one of the fastest cards on the face of the earth!
When I opened the parcel, the first thing that struck me was the sheer size of the box. Measuring about 20 x 50cm, I have not seen boxes this size for graphics cards before. What lurked inside was also a nice surprise, far more than most competing solutions on the market. Here’s what I received:
The card (duh!) Driver CD Leadtek DVD Magic Full version of the game “DroneZ” Full version of the game “Gunlok” S-Video Cable Composite pass-through lead
The card itself is quite large and heavy, with most of the weight being attributed to the massive heastink/fan combination in place. In fact, the card weighed more than my GlobalWin FOP32-1 HSF unit! The length of the card may cause problems depending on where the IDE connectors are placed on your motherboard. I had no such problems with the AOpen AX37 Plus, but did when I tried the GeForce3 TD on an AOpen AX3S Pro. Just be careful and you’ll avoid damaging the card.
The heatsink is made of solid aluminium and covers both the GeForce3 GPU and the DDR SGRAM. A small fan is mounted above the GPU which keeps the 57 million transistors nice and cool. The memory, however, could do with some better cooling… even running at default speed the heatsinks were painful to touch at times. Rated at 4ns and 500MHz, this DDR SGRAM really packs a punch! There are also numerous little transistors and capacitors on the back of the card, which can be a right royal pain, as they would come off easily if bumped accidentally. Due to the complexity of the card, this is somewhat forgivable.
Initial Observations
This card was very well behaved, and takes the honour for being the least troublesome graphics card I’ve had the pleasure of installing. I initially installed the Leadtek 12.00 drivers, but switched to the 12.90 nVidia reference drivers after I discovered incompatibilities with the VIA Apollo Pro 266 chipset used in the test system. After this, the card was impeccable, and I couldn’t fault it.
2D Image quality was exceptional, although not as good as ATi and Matrox cards. My Prolink GeForce2 MX obviously has poor filters, as it looks blurry and “smudgy” at 1024x768x32. No such problems with the Leadtek card, they should be commended for not cost-cutting and shipping decent filters as standard.
