GeForce 256 Roundup
Difficult to get, too hot to handle.


Here is a roundup of the best GeForce 256s in the market today.

Creative Labs 3D Blaster Annihilator

The Annihilator is a bare-bones GeForce card. There's no TV-out and no game bundle. But Creative makes up for that with some terrific display utilities, including a system tray icon that lets you change resolutions and color depths on the fly. As with all the GeForce cards we've tested, the Annihilator's image quality and game compatibility are excellent. 3D scenes are rendered sharply, the colors are bright and accurate. There were no incompatibilities under Direct3D or OpenGL in the games we've tested. The Annihilator has your standard 32mb SDRAM, 120-MHz core clock speed, 166-MHz memory clock and an AGP 2X/4X interface . Performance was in-line with the other GeForce cards. Quake III Arena, everyone's favorite shooter, ran at 47 frames per second at 1,024 by 768 and 32-bit colors.

Guillemot Prophet 3D

Higher up the GeForce ladder is the 3D Prophet. It's a fairly straight forward card that implements the Nvidia reference design, reference display drivers and utilities. The Prophet edges out the 3D Blaster Annihilator in features. Guillemot's GeForce card has an S-Video Out jack and a converter cable to offer composite output. Powered by the Brooktree 869 video encoder chip, the Prophet supports 640-by-480 and 800-by-600 resolutions. TV-out quality in games is actually quite good; you can play your favorite games on a large-screen TV at 640 by 480 and still get accurate colors. The only problem with the TV-out electronics is that it does a poor job with text, which is very fuzzy. Also, there are no controls for sizing and positioning the TV display.

The card performes well, on the level of other GeForce cards in this roundup. Because all the cards are clocked at the same speed, 120-MHz core clock speed and 166-MHz memory clock, and all are using 32mb of SDRAM, their performance are similar.

Guillemot is a brand that is not readily available from computer shops in the Metro. Heck, few stores stock up on GeForce 256 cards because it's an expensive piece of hardware. But most stores will gladly order one for you. For buyers looking for a good, mid-priced GeForce with good utilities and TV-out capability, the Guillemot 3D Prophet fits the bill perfectly.

Asus AGP V-6600

The new Asus V-6600 has a TV-in as well as a TV-out port, just like the TNT2-based 3800. These rare features make both cards very appealing to many buyers.

The V-6600 uses Nvidia's GeForce 256 chipset. Using 3.48 drivers, the card performs at par with other GeForce. There's 32MB of the 200MHz, 5 nanosecond SDRAM memory, S-video, composite video inputs and outputs and a jack at the back of the card for 3D glasses. A lot of improvements were made on the card TV in/out electronics compared to the older 3800, whose video-capture circuits would bog down at anything over 15fps. The V-6600 can now handle a constant 30 frames-per-second at resolutions of 320x240.

Asus ships great software with the card. It lets you check whether the onboard fan is turning, how fast it's turning, the temperature of the GeForce 256 chip, and its voltage draw. Toss in Asus' clock-rate-tweaking software, and you have a good set of tools for tweaking the card's clock rate and all kinds of fiddling. And; in case you make a mistake, there's a safe-mode recovery utility that resets the card to its factory defaults. The core clock can be cranked all the way up to 142MHz and the memory to 195MHz. We were able to crank it up to 130/195 for five hours of gaming without hiccups. Of course, results may vary on other systems, but in general, you can expect a card to run at 120/166.

Summing it up

All cards still fall short of the Holy Grail of 60 frames per second when run at max settings (1024x768,32-bitcolors). But as the newer games start to take advantage of the GeForce's hardware transform and lighting engine, we think frame rates will improve a bit as the CPU is spared from the tiresome task of rendering lighting in software mode.

In our tests, all cards performed on the almost the same level. Overclockers will be somewhat disappointed with the GeForce 256 as there doesn't seem to be a huge impact on actual game performance by cranking up the clock rates. The chips on these cards are surprisingly stable for a brand-new architecture while performing like a next-generation card should, delivering faster and higher quality graphics than anything you've seen before.

The Asus AGP V-6600 earns our nod of approval as the best among the three GeForce 256 cards we've tested so far. Users wanting TV-out, good video capture capability, and a terrific software bundle including an excellent thermal health-monitoring software, get more bang for the buck with this card. The faster 200MHz memory clock raises the cost a bit more than the others, but you get your money's worth.

The Creative Labs 3D Blaster Annihilator, on the other hand is a no-frills card with terrific software thrown in. Do not look for TV-out and stuff because all you get is your basic VGA port. The low cost of the Annihilator makes it very tempting for the budget-conscious player.

by M.B.Reyes


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