Visiontek GeForce3

The card we received by VisionTek is their final retail board, which you’ll find in a shop near you :. Initial looks of the card looked very promising, with a well designed PCB. The 64MB of DDR chips are flush-mounted and are placed along the sides and rear of the card. Unlike some GeForce 3 card available out there, VisionTek included heatsinks for the memory as well, which gives us greater room for more stable overclocking.

 

Visiontek has maintained the reference design of the GeForce 3 by nVidia. However one thing missing in the card is the connector for the Digital Flat Panel display.

At the heart of the PCB you find the GeForce 3 GPU composed primarily of the NV20 chipset clocked at 200MHz, which is attached to a large heatsink and a fan powered by the AGP BUS.

A unique fact about the heatsink of this card is that it has been designed to flow air to the memory heatsinks as well. The nfiniteFX engine makes GeForce3 the only GPU in the world with a programmable Vertex Processor and a programmable Pixel Processor. This programmability enables a virtually infinite number of special effects. Before the GeForce 3 was introduced, Matrox was the primary graphics card manufacture who boasted of hardware bump-mapping. Until now no one could match the quality of graphics these cards produced. Amazingly the GeForce 3 now includes more Bump-mapping features than any Matrox board out there. No need to take my word for it, just look at the spectacular water effect in the 3D Mark 2001 demo.

Taking a look at the memory of the GeForce 3, VisionTek has coupled 64MB of DDR SDRAM in the board. They are rated at 3.8ns and clocked at 230MHz (460MHz DDR), giving rise to a 7.36GB/sec memory bandwidth. The core is clocked at 200MHz by default. This is slower than the GeForce Ultra, which has a core clock speed of 250MHz. The board also sports a 350MHz RAMDAC. The first thing we did as soon as we received the board was to increase the memory speed to 510MHz and the core to 235MHz, which the GeForce 3 accepted with no problems at all.

All right, onto with the tests……..