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When all three of the Gainward
Titanium cards arrived in the lab, we gave them thorough
physical inspections before installing them into our test
system and running any benchmarks.
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Quality
of
the Gainward Titanium Series |
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Lot's of NVIDIA
hardware! |
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The GeForce 2 Ti/500
XP ViVo Golden Sample
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Physically, all of the cards
appeared to be similar. The most obvious common
"feature" was the bright red PCB. No plane-Jane
green cards here! When I initially saw these
cards, my first thought was, "Wow! These babies would
"mesh" well with the
MSI K7T266 Pro 2RU." Couple one of these cards with
that MSI board, some red, rounded IDE cables and you'll
have one seriously red system! :)
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| An the bottom of
the GeForce 2 Ti / 500's external plate, you'll find a
standard DB15 analog VGA out connector, and the Video-in and
Out connector. The card is cooled with an excellent,
round, aluminum heatsink / fan combo that is attached to the
board with two plastic spring clips. The cooler looks
similar to the ThermalTake "Orb" series of coolers, but is
slightly smaller, and won't cost you a PCI slot. The
eight 4ns DDR RAM chips, totaling 64MB were cooled with four
passive heatsinks. Gainward's cooling efforts paid
off, as you'll see later we had good luck overclocking these
cards.
The GeForce 3 Ti/450
PowerPack Golden Sample
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Physically,
the Gainward GeForce 3 Ti / 450 looks similar to the GF2
model, and just like the Ti / 550 with one exception.
All of the boards have the red PCB in common.
| The external
plate also houses a standard DB15 analog monitor connector,
and an S-Video-out connector, but on the GeForce 3 Ti / 450
they are located at the top of the plate. The card is
cooled with the exact same heatsink / fan combo, and RAM
heatsinks as the other two boards. Underneath those
RAM heatsinks, you'll find 64MB of 5ns DDR SDRAM on the Ti /
450.
The GeForce 3 Ti/550
PowerPack
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No, you are
not experiencing Deja Vu, all three of the Gainward
Titaniums we are reviewing just look very similar!
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The Gainward GeForce 3 Ti / 550
is the only card we received that came equipped with a DVI
digital monitor output connector, along with the standard
analog and S-Video out connectors. Again the same
cooling scheme was used for the GPU and RAM, but populating
the Ti / 550 is 64MB of 3.8NS DDR RAM. Something we're
pleased to report is that all three of these Gainward boards
used thermal paste and the T.I.M. between the cooler and
GPU.
There was one small chink in the
armor though. The cooler on our Ti / 550 arrived with
one of the spring clips disloged. Once we pushed the
clip back down, it was fine though. If we had not
noticed this our card could have overheated.
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Installation and
Drivers of the Gainward Titanium Series |
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Anyone can do
this... |
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We did not have any problems
installing any of the Gainward Titanium cards. We
inserted the cards, booted up the machine and let the driver
CD autorun. One re-boot later and we were up and
running. Gainward included the older v21.81 NVIDIA
reference drivers on the CD with all of their Ti cards, but
as of today they have v22.50s are available for download on
their site. We won't bore you with any driver shots,
I'm sure by now you've all seen what NVIDIA's drivers look
like!What we will show
you is Gainward's ExperTool. This useful utility gives
users easy access to all of the driver control panels with a
click of an icon in your system tray...
From within this utility, is
also where you ca select the "Enhanced" performance mode
which essentially overclocks the cards to the advertised
speeds.
The
Test Rig, Some Screens & DirectX 8 Benchmarks
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