Graphics Card Round up Based On The Geforce2 GTS Chipset

The next on our test bed is the Guillemot 3D Prophet 64MB monster. Again the card itself is not very different to the other GF2 GTS clones, but the bright blue PCB and heat sinks are real eye catchers.

Technical Specifications:

• Nvidia GeForce2 GTS
• 350MHz RAMDAC
• OpenGL and Direct3D API support
• 64 MB DDR RAM

The board

This board is very compact in comparison to the other 64MB boards. The reason behind this being Guillemot using the official reference design instead of what they did with their 32 MB version of the card. Dimensions wise the 32MB sibling is actually about 1/3 wider than what we have with us right now. The core and memory comes clocked at the default speeds of 200/333MHz. The DDR memory chips are covered in light-blue heat sinks and a light blue heat sink/fan combo cools the core. A thermal adhesive attaches the sinks to memory, and the chip and it’s cooler are kept together by a piece of thermal tape. It’s very sad that most Graphics card manufacturers just over look this area and don’t equip these cards with some good thermal paste. Ok, so you & I could do that by ourselves (can you really? * Grin *) but not every one out there would want to mess around with their $350++ graphics card. But then on the other hand if you’re not a computer geek (who’d anyway know how to do all this basic stuff) you wont be needing the perfect cooling solution cause your card is going to be damn stock till the very end!!

The Prophet has TV-out, DFP digital output, DVD software; the works!! The kind of board for my liking.

Overclocking

Satisfaction again folks!! I took her right up to a staggering 400MHz memory and 250 MHz core!! The nifty little heat sinks seem to do their work right to the point. The temperature was measured to be at 125 F at the overclocked speeds.

I have to make a small note here that should be applied around all GF2 GTS cards. We found that the best way to overclock the GPU is to start with memory and increase it to the maximum and then slowly increase the core clock speed until the system becomes unstable. (of course, you should bring the core speed down a little after that) I say this because the GF2 GTS doesn’t come anywhere close to the theoretical fill rate at default memory speeds. You could try this out yourself, by keeping the core at stock and just increasing the memory speed. The performance gains are very impressive.

Pros:

• Overclocking capability
• The additional features

Cons:

• The staggering $419

Last but not the least the Elsa Gladiac 64MB GF2 GTS;