Leadtek Winfast GeForce 256 DDR

The Leadtek Winfast GeForce256 DDR
Double Your Data Rate - Double Your Fun

Semiconductor Technology is fascinating.  An engineer will come up with a new technology that allows for a significant increase in performance over existing technology, as with the NVidia GeForce.  As the new platform matures, the speed and throughput of given device is realized and the limitations are exposed.  At that point, another brilliant engineer sets out to improve again on the initial design in an effort to alleviate the bottlenecks and achieve yet an even higher level of performance.  As we all know, this process happens at an alarming rate in the Computer and Networking Industries as well as Semiconductors. 

Local memory bandwidth was an initial bottleneck for NVidia GeForce chipset based 3D Graphics cards.  It was a bottleneck that was envisioned early on by NVidia however.  They designed the initial GeForce architecture to be capable of interfacing to a new high performance SDRAM and SGRAM with double the data rate of current standard DRAM architectures.  DDR SDRAM/SGRAM, or Double Data Rate Synch DRAM, allows any device interfacing to it to perform reads and writes to the DRAM on the rising and falling edge of the memory clock cycle.  With each clock cycle, you can perform both a read from and a write to the memory.  As a result the effective throughput of the DDR SDRAM is doubled.  Hence the term, "double data rate".  

This is the technology behind both the DDR SDRAM and DDR SGRAM.  SGRAM is Synchronous Graphics RAM that is configured to cater to the needs of  2D/3D Graphics designs.  It is comprised of the same basic cell technology of the DRAM. 

This is our evaluation of the Leadtek Winfast GeForce256 DDR.  Let's see what new tricks DDR Memory has up its sleeve.

 

Leadtek Winfast GeForce256 DDR - Specifications A neat and clean little machine

The card we tested had VGA and TV-Out but no flat panel support.  The card in the picture above has a flat panel connector.  It is the black base connector in this picture.  In addition, this card came with 32Mb Infineon (formerly known as Siemens Semconductor) DDR SGRAM (Synchronous Graphics RAM rated at 6ns. This RAM is also rated at 300MHz. DDR.  Interestingly enough, Infineon also has this memory available rated as fast as 5ns.  This should allow for 400 MHz. DDR should it be utilized by Leadtek or other graphics card manufacturers some day.

There is also a fairly good heat sink and fan combo on the Winfast GeForce DDR, as with other NVidia based solutions from Leadtek.  It could be a little more substantial and thus provide better heat dissipation.  Never the less, it does the job adequately. 

Set  Up, Installation and Overclocking - This way...