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THE CARD:
Every product that enters the
HotHardware labs gets a thorough physical inspection before
it is installed into one of our test rigs...
The "TD" version on the Leadtek
WinFast GeForce 3 Ti500 is equipped with TV-Out as well as a
DVI connector (hence the TD). There is also a "TDH"
version of the card that adds hardware monitoring
capabilities. The TV-Out on the Leadtek WinFast
GeForce 3 Ti500 TD is a cut above most other cards thanks to
the Conexant CX25871 TV encoder. The CX25871 is
capable of outputting to a television at a resolution of
1024x768, while the majority of competing products only
output up to 800x600. Score 1 for Leadtek...
The oversized cooling solution
is just begging to be talked about. There are quite a
few things that need to be mentioned. First, notice
that the fan sits in the center of the large heatsink, not
directly over the GPU. The fan is just slightly
raised, allowing the blades to blow air directly at the
center of the GPU and out across the memory. The
heatsink is held in place with two plastic spring clips, and
has a lip that curves over the top of the PCB.
Normally we would remove the cooler included on a video
board to check what type of thermal interface material is
being used, but we didn't have to with the WinFast GeForce 3
Ti500. Why? You ask...Well, if you look closely at the
last picture, you can see the thermal paste applied to
memory! This is the first GeForce 3 that we have seen
that exclusively uses thermal paste for both the memory and
GPU. We were very happy to see Leadtek took this extra
step to insure their cooling solution would work more
efficiently.
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| Installation / Setup Of The
Leadtek WinFast GeForce 3 Ti500 TD |
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Piece of cake... |
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Installing the
Leadtek WinFast GeForce 3 Ti500 is just like any other
plug-and-play video card. Insert the card into your
AGP slot, install the drivers and you're up and running...
You'll be sure your card is
working properly when you see the initial boot-up splash
screen going through it's self check and counting off the
memory.
THE DRIVERS:
The drivers
included on the CD-ROM were version 21.81 of NVIDIA's
standard reference drivers.
We have
posted screenshots of these drivers multiple times, so
we won't bore you with them again. We did encounter
one problem with the included drivers we must mention
though. Anytime we tried to access the Device
Selection or Color Correction tabs, we received the above
error. We won't hold too much against Leadtek for this
bug though, once we updated the drivers to the version
21.85s we used for testing, the problem went away.
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| Overclocking
with
the Leadtek WinFast GeForce 3 Ti500 TD |
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Not what we
hoped... |
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The WinFast GeForce
3 Ti500 TD is bundled with Leadtek's "WinFox" suite.
WinFox consists of quite a few utilities that allow you to
tweak man aspects of the card from gamma correction to
overclocking.
The Overclocking portion of the
suite is called "Speed Runner". Speed runner is a very
simple tool that give you the ability to adjust core and
memory clockspeeds with a simple slider.
By default, the Leadtek WinFast
GeForce 3 Ti500 TD is clocked at 240MHz. core and 500MHz.
(DDR) memory...just like every other Ti500. We spent
some time overclocking our card and were able to hit maximum
speeds of 266MHz. / 571MHz. These are some very high
numbers, but we have to admit we were expecting more.
We've seen standard GeForce 3s hit speeds almost as high as
this. With the enhanced cooling found on the Leadtek
card, we assumed we'd see speeds a bit higher.
It's
MadOnion Time!
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