The
GeForce 2 market is what one would call
"saturated". There are more
flavors and brands of nVidia
product available than you can shake a stick
at. A new entry into this over indulged area
would definitely have to stand out in order to get
noticed. Well, for us the card that is
standing out fairly prominently, is the Abit
Siluro GF256 GTS 64MB DDR. So you are
thinking, "what is so special about a 64MB
GeForce2"? We'll see if we can show you
in the pages to come.
Abit's
first effort into the graphics market was with the
nVidia TNT2 Ultra based Siluro
GT2 Ultra. Needless to say, there have
been several follow product releases from nVidia
since then. Abit
seemed to miss the boat initially, on the
introduction of a GeForce2 based product, when the
chipset became available. So at this late
juncture, they decided to join the battle with
nothing less than a high end contender with 64MB
of DDR SDRAM on board and a legacy of
over-clocking prowess backing it up. Let see
what makes the Siluro GF256 GTS 64 tick...
|
Specifications
Of The Siluro GF256 GTS 64MB DDR |
All
the GeForce2 goodness with twice the
calories and memory... |
|
- Graphics
Controller: NVIDIA
GeForce2 GTS GPU
- 200MHz.
Core Clock Speed
- Integrated
Transforms and Lighting
- Per pixel
shading and dual texturing
- Full Scene
hardware anti-aliasing, multi-texturing,
procedural texturing
- Environmental
mapping, bump mapping, shadow stenciling
- Bilinear,
Trilinear and 8-tap anisotropic texture
filtering
- 1.6
GigaTexels per second
- RAMDAC/Pixel
Cycle: 350
MHz
- Memory:
64MB of
Double Data Rate SDRAM - Rated at 6ns.
(166MHz./333 DDR)
- Bus
Systems: AGP
2x/4x
- Standards:
DPMS,
DDC2B, Plug & Play
- Video
Module: 1x
Video-In & 1x Video-Out
- BIOS:
VESA
BIOS 3.0 support
- API
Support: DirectX
6, DirectX 7, OpenGL
- Horizontal
SYNC Signals: 31.5Hz
- 108.5Hz
- Vertical
Refresh Rate: 60Hz
- 200Hz
-
Software
drivers for Windows 95 & 98, Windows
2000, Windows NT 4.0
-
Software
Bundle consisting of WinDVD, Test Drive 5,
Shogo and various utilities
Here
is a shot of the memory that was on the Siluro
board we received.
These
are 64Mb DDR SDRAM chips from Hyundai. You
can check the specs
here if you like. Again, at first glance
of the specs, you would be lead to believe that
this is a standard issue 64MB GeForce2 card.
Upon further inspection however, it is apparent
that Abit went the distance with respect to
design, quality and features. In
addition, the active cooling on the card is a high
quality cylindrical fin design that is sure to add
stability. Finally, the DDR SDRAM is
definitely something special (at least the product
that was on the card we received). We'll
touch more on this later. Let's plug in a
crank 'er up!
Installation,
Drivers, Visuals
|