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Summary The performance of GeForce is pretty good. But the standard memory limits the performance at high resolutions noticeable. The gain is often too small for owners of a TNT2 Ultra or Voodoo3 3000 card to buy a GeForce. So you should wait for the DDR cards that will become available soon. But if you own a TNT, Vanta, M64 or Savage card you can upgrade to GeForce without worry. Youīll get way more power than you current card allows. Thereīs nothing really faster than GeForce out there. Thereīs an ATi Rage Fury MAXX that uses two chips in dual mode. It can reach GeForce in some benchmarks but itīs very expensive because every chip needs its own 32MB of memory. So you pay a price of 64MB to get real 32MB. Hardware T&L is no big factor in games yet. Weīll have to wait and see what games will come out in future. Thereīs lot support for it from the game developers but these guys always like the hype. You should see High Poly games like the WXP Demo in Action to understand how fantastic high polygon games can look like. The framcounter sometimes drops to 15FPS in the demo but the game will be released in a year so you can say that itīs not optimized very much yet. If you miss more CPUīs in this review you should take a look at the RIVA Station article GeForce & CPU Scaling. To use a GeForce you should own a PII 400 or faster to get profit of it. There are voices that speak of voltage and AGP problems in AMD Athlon mainboards. You should be carefull with that combination. You shouldīnt use GeForce in Super Socket 7 boards at all. Voltage regulation is not very good on these mainboards and there are also a lot of AGP issues. You better should upgrade to a Slot1 or SlotA system instead of buying a faster 3D card. You can can see in the benchmark results that thereīs no real performance differnce between the GeForce cards. They only differ in the hardware features and bundled software. If you want Video IN and OUT thereīs no other card than the ASUS V6600 Deluxe which offers it. If you only want TV-Out you can choose the Guillemot 3D Prophet. If donīt need any TV features you can take the ELSA ErazorX. Or you can choose them by price. At all, you canīt do much wrong with any of these cards. ASUS V6600 Deluxe ASUS produces the most complete GeForce card out there. The drivers are not solid in all points yet but thatīs only a matter of a few weeks untils these issues are fixed. The bundled sofware is impressive and the SmartDoctor technology is a very innovative feature. Thereīs no other GeForce card that offers TV IN & OUT so thereīs no alternative if you want this. The Performance of the card is good - as with the other cards. ELSA Erazor X The performance of the card is very good but it canīt reach the V6600 when you look at the features. If you want Video Out you should wait for the ELSA Erazor Xē with DDR RAM which will have a TV-Out function. Thereīs no plan for a version with Video IN yet. ELSA ChipGuard technology shows that ELSA is also always searching for new features and improvements. Guillemot 3D Prophet. The 3D Prophet offers everything that gamers want. Fan, fast memory and always actual drivers - an advantage of the Guillemot reference drivers handling. But the TV-Out options are not vey solid yet. There are freeware tools available in the web which show how a TV-Out should look like - or take a look on the TNT2 card Erazor III - THATīs a TV-Out. The price seems a bit high because thereīs not much software bundled with the card. Final comment I like the performance of the new generation. But I hate it that I always have to criticize the same things with every generation again. I think driver developers donīt read the reviews of their cards or why are most of them still not able to create their menus with a maximum of comfort and useability? They place buttons where they find room or they let you do the same things again and again after every driver update (like the refresh rate settings etc...). There are freeware tools like HZ-Tool that show you that there is a need for a better drivers handling and options! Another thing is the high power consumption of the GeForce. Neither card or mainboard manufacturers give detailed information about the compatibility issues of each other. Each side tells you that itīs not their component which has problems. So youīre going into an odyssey when you have a problems with your system - this really really sucks! Itīs time to publish detailed information about these problems. I donīt understand why there is no clear data about because it should be good advertising to show the own product quality. Or do all have to take a swap in quality nowadays!?! |
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| Copyright: RIVA Station 1999 - Lars Weinand URL of this Article: www.rivastation.com/geforces_e.htm - If you want to link to it, please use this URL! :-) |
