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The
Gainward GF4
Powerpack! Ultra/650 8X/XP TV/DVI is a
new revision of the
GF4
Powerpack! Ultra/650 TV/DVI that we reviewed in
September. The difference between the two cards is
much less than what we saw with the Pro 600 model.
Essentially, the Ultra/650 8X TV/DVI has a new core (the
NV28) that
supports the AGP 3.0 standard and it comes with a total of
128MBs of DDR-RAM compared to the 64MB on the original
Ultra/650. This time around Gainward opted
to pass on the RAM sinks that came equipped on the older
650, leaving the newer card's RAM bare. The reason
they decided to omit the RAM sink is most likely cost, but we suspect
it will have little effect on the overclocking performance of the card.
We were happy to see that the
heat sink was mounted to the card with spring clips, and
that it had an even layer of
thermal grease applied, making for maximum thermal transfer to the
heat sink. The remainder of the card was standard
Ti4200 fare, offering up a VGA and DVI output, as well as a
port for the TV-In/Out functions of the card. The
cooler was the common circular low-profile cooler that is
often found on Gainward products.
There really isn't a whole lot
that we haven't seen before with this model aside from the AGP
8X. Before we get into the
benchmarking of these two cards, we thought we might throw
some you a few quick screenshots from one of our favorite
games.
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Some Eye Candy |
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Examples of Visual Quality |
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No video card
review would be complete without a few screenshots for your
viewing pleasure. So we rummaged
through our extensive game collection and came up with one
of our favorites, Medal of Honor
- Allied Assault. This has to be one of the best games
ever, and if you haven't played it, you are really missing
out! Below are a few teaser shots taken with the
Ultra/650
8X/XP 'Golden Sample' in the driver's seat. To see
just how nice things could get, we enabled 64-Tap
anisotropic filtering and 4X FSAA. Enjoy!
Medal of
Honor - Allied Assault
OK, let's get
back to work. Next we're going to take a quick look at
some overclocking before we fire up the HH test
bed and get the benchmarks going!
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Overclocking |
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Just a Quickie |
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With these two cards, we
put the EXPERTool to work to see what speeds we could
reach. With the Gainward GF4 MX
Pro 600/8X-XP ?Golden Sample?, we set the EXPERTool to
Enhanced mode which increased the card from 275/500 to
290/590 and the card seemed more than happy with it.
In the end, the enhanced mode offered an increase of 5.4%
on the core and 18% in memory speed.
The GF4 Ti Ultra 650/XP
?Golden Sample? started out at a default 250/444
which increased to 260/520 in Enhanced Mode. With
this card we had no trouble completing a run of
3DMark2001SE at 310/530! In the end we gained 24% in
core speed and boosted the memory by 19%. Obviously these two products are built with overclocking in mind and
should keep the avid overclocker quite happy.
Next
we'll get cranking on some numbers to see how the addition
of AGP8X compliance
affects performance versus AGP4X.
The
Test Rig and Some DirectX Testing...
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