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GeForce3 cards
are in total abundance these days. As an OEM, to
compete in this space and get more than your fair share of
the market, one must differentiate. With the plethora
of "reference design" cards on the retail shelves, it is
extremely easy for your product to get lost in the crowd,
unless you have brand name recognition.
By now you are
probably thinking, "what's with the face on the left of this
page?". Take a good look at that face and remember it.
That face is the company logo for a Taiwanese based OEM by
the name of Gainward. Although
their "CardExpert" line of products did garner some fairly
good recognition and praise since their inception in the
late 80s, the Gainward name is still far from a household
word. However, we think you should sit up and take
note of their latest product and make sure your remember the
Gainward
name. Why is this, you ask? Because in our
humble opinion, they have what could be THE fastest GeForce3
card on the market right now.
This review will
show you why we feel this card is currently the fastest
GeForce3 we've tested and quite possibly the fastest on the
market at the time of this writing. That dude in the
picture above doesn't look too happy does he? Perhaps
that is because he has his "game face" on and Gainward is
playing to win. Let's have a look.
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| Specifications Of The
Gainward GeForce3 Power Pack !!!
Golden Sample |
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Specially selected for
top performance and overclocking |
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Architecture & Features
GeForce3 FEATURES:
- nFiniteFX engine for
full programmability
- Lightspeed Memory
Architecture for unmatched performance
- Surface engine for
high-order surfaces and patches
- Programmable Vertex
Shader
- Procedural
deformations
- Programmable matrix
palette skinning
- Keyframe animation
interpolation
- Morphing
- Fog effects (Radial,
Elevation, Non-linear)
- Lens effects (Fish
eye, Wide angle, Fresnel effects, Water refraction)
- Programmable Pixel
Shader
- Phong-style lighting
for per-pixel accuracy
- Dot3 bump mapping
- Environmental bump
mapping (EMBM)
- Procedural textures
- Per-pixel reflections
- HRAA?high-resolution
anti-aliasing
- Featuring Quincunx AA
mode
- Integrated hardware
transform engine
- Integrated hardware
lighting engine
- DirectX and S3TC
texture compression
- Dual cube environment
mapping capability
- Reflection maps
- Accurate, real-time
environment reflections
- Hardware accelerated
real-time shadows
- True, reflective bump
mapping
- Z-correct bump mapping
- Phong-style lighting
effects on bump maps with reflections
- High-performance 2D
rendering engine
- Optimized for 32-,
24-, 16-, 15- and 8-bpp modes
- True-color hardware
cursor with alpha
- Multi-buffering
(double, triple or quad) for smooth animation and
video playback
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- High-quality HDTV/DVD
playback
- High-definition video
processor (HDVP) for full-screen, full-frame video
playback of HDTV and DVD content
- Independent hardware
color controls for video overlay
- Hardware color-space
conversion (YUV 4:2:2 and 4:2:0)
- Motion compensation
- 5-tap horizontal by
3-tap vertical filtering
- 8:1 up/down scaling
- Per-pixel color keying
- Multiple video windows
supported for CSC and filtering
- DVD sub-picture
alpha-blended compositing
Specially
Selected Components
- GPU and DRAM chips are
selected for highest performance and yield.
- High Over-Clocking
Potential
- Included EXPERTool
Software for setting memory and GPU timing
Software Package:
- Install / Driver
CD-ROM manuals.
- Full of WinDVD
- Full Ulead Video
Studio
- Full Versions of
- E-Color 3Deep
- Adobe ActiveShare
- Imagemore
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What makes this card different
besides its wild looking red PCB? The construction is
about as good as most top name GeForce3 cards on the market.
Gainward elected to go with an orb like cooler for the GPU
and standard heat sinks for the DDR SDRAM. Of course
all of the cooling hardware is painted red. We aren't
sure how this layer of paint may affect performance but
remember, this is Gainward's high end card. They
probably wouldn't paint anything on the sinks that would
limit thermal conductivity. We'll look into this a
little bit later. Other than that, things are pretty
standard for the Power Pack !!! Golden Sample, with one
fairly significant exception.
click for full
view
This card is
built of specially selected components. The folks at
Gainward have built a GeForce3 card that has significantly
more margin, from a clock speed standpoint, than most
standard cards on the market. The "Golden Sample" is
intended to yield higher core and memory clocks and
thus offer better overall "over-clockability".
We know you like
the sound of that and so did we. We'll show you the
fruits of Gainward's labor in the pages ahead. For
now, let's finish up with the extras, move out to test setup
and eventually, what you came here for, performance testing.
This is card is
pretty well outfitted. It has both a TIVO port and a
Digital Flat Panel connector. The bundle is solid but
geared towards a professional/multimedia type, with WinDVD
and UnLead Video Studio as the main attractions.
Frankly, with a GeForce3 card, most folks are interested in
some level of 3D Gaming. It would have been nice to
see one of the new Direct X 8 driven titles like DroneZ, Max
Payne etc., included in the bundle.
However, this is
only icing on the cake. The real meat and potatoes for
this GeForce3, is performance. Let's see what the Golden
Sample is made of.
Drivers,
Features, and Screenshots
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