GeForce2 Ultra Review (2/12)

Card details

Large heatsink / fan combo

But let's get to the card itself. The Ultra versions will ship with 64MB DDR-SDRAM. NVIDIA's reference board features 8 (probably astronomically expensive) 4ns modules, with four modules sharing one heatsink - a very good decision. These parts get incredibly hot, as memory goes - 45°C! The GF2 Ultra chip itself sports a massive heatsink as well as an impressive fan. At first glance you might mistake this board for a standard GeForce2 64MB, their layout is so similar, but upon closer inspection you find that this design has been extended.

Cooled memory - the heatsinks get about 45°C while running.

The chip runs at 250MHz, while the memory is clocked at a sensational 460MHz. This is a full 38% faster than on a standard GF2, where the memory runs at 333MHz. This is obviously going to be great for memory bandwidth, now 7,4GB/s, up from the standard 5,4GB/s. (Can you say "...damn!"?) This helps to alleviate the GeForce2's major bottleneck: the insufficient memory bandwidth. Still, high resolutions, 32bit color and anti-aliasing can max out this board relatively quickly. The increased corespeed doesn't really have any tangible effect on performance, however. Although NVIDIA claims a triangle-throughput of 31M triangles per second as compared to the standard GF2's 25M, high-polygon games that can take advantage of such power are still nowhere to be seen. So aside from the increased clockspeeds, there are no other technical differences between the Ultra and the GTS.

Central heating for your PC	The design differs from standard 64MB GTS cards.

Now letīs take a look on the performance of the Ultra... thatīs whatīs important here.

Copyright: 06.09.2000 -   RIVA Station 2000 - Lars Weinand
No Copy without Permission!

Translation by Benjamin Kraft

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