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In the Forums... |
Posted: January 17, 2001 Written by: Tuan "Solace" Nguyen Benchmarks Quake 3 Arena  The WinFast definitely lives up to the GTS name. In terms of performance, it absolutely demolishes every other GTS out there. But then again I’m testing on the new Pentium 4 system, which is faster in Quake 3 than any AMD system -- what I used to test other GTS cards. But then again, this is the fastest card because it stocks the fastest memory for a GTS card. Leadtek didn’t call it Enhanced for nothing. Overclocking the card, I managed to push out an average of 5% to 6% in speed increases. I didn’t notice any visual corruption during game testing or Windows use. I tried going higher but weird things started happening like speeds started chopping. Going from a stock memory speed of 333MHz to 385MHz is pretty impressive.  Moving things up to High Quality lowered the card’s speed but definitely not by much. 1280x1024 HQ was definitely playable thanks in part to the extra 32MB that came with the card. Obviously the Pentium 4 assisted but when you’re at that high of a resolution, memory bandwidth caps the speed. I’m talking about the video card’s bandwidth, not the system. Dual channel PC800 RDRAM running on a quad pumped 100MHz FSB being a bottleneck? I don’t think so. We see the same improvements with the overclocked settings in High Quality as we did in Normal quality. As it stands, the Enhanced WinFast GTS does really offer a lot more than other GTS’s out there and at a lower price too! Analysis Let me remind you again that Leadtek has decided not to release a GTS Pro board because the market just doesn’t seem to demand it. It’s too much of an in-between type card. You have your standard 64MB GTS, then your Ultra. A Pro would lift some of the memory limits of the standard GTS but with the Enhanced WinFast GTS from Leadtek, you can do it all by yourself without paying for GTS Pro price! What a great idea! After all that tweaking, you have onboard hardware diagnostics and monitoring built in. Leadtek definitely knows what the user wants and they delivered superbly. |
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