Graphics Card Round up Based On The Geforce2 GTS Chipset

What I noticed right away was how similar the Tornado GF2 GTS looked to Nvidia’s reference design board. It does not have TV-out and has space for an optional TV-out daughter board. The board only comes with the basic D-Sub monitor output. This will no doubt disappoint people, who plan on using the TV-out. The board is equipped with eight,8MB Hyundai(I used to drive a Hyundai at one time) SGRAM chips which are rated at 6ns.(166Mhz DDR). The effectiveness of 64MB’s of memory on a video card is something that can be argued about. True, it won’t make a night and day difference over a 32MB card at low resolutions, but it sure makes a big difference at the higher resolutions. Also the S3TC compression introduced on the Nvidia 5.xx series drivers makes the need of costly additional on board DDR SGRAM chips less important to a certain degree. Essentially what S3TC compression does is compress the large detailed textures of games so that the amount of data needed to be stored on the video card memory itself is less.

But the limiting factor of this clever method is that games are going to have more & more details and the textures will become even larger, filling up the 32MB’s of on card memory real fast. Also S3TC compression is something that has to be implemented by game developers, therefore a game that doesn’t support S3TC will be crippled on a system that has only 32MB,over a card that sports the additional 32MB’s of on board memory. In other words, a 64MB card will be capable of handling many new 3D games that will come to the market in the near future where the lesser-equipped sibling will fail.

The Tornado GF2, comes clocked at the usual GTS default clock speeds of 200MHz(Core)/333MHz(Memory). So theoretically, by default the memory is already clocked at it’s rated maximum, for the 6ns chips.

A stock heat sink/fan combo cools the chip and Inno3D has not gone in for any special fancy cooling, and a layer of thermal glue keeps the heat sink in place.