Leadtek WinFast PX8800 GTX TDH

It’s been awhile since we last took a look at a GeForce card from Leadtek. Too long in fact. For those of you who may not be familiar with Leadtek’s products we’ll provide a quick refresher.

Back in the Riva TNT2/GeForce days, NVIDIA-based cards from third-party manufacturers were often criticized for their poor 2D display quality. While NVIDIA’s reference boards utilized high quality components and filters, third-party manufacturers utilized cheaper parts in order to cut costs. Consequently, as the screen resolution increased, signal strength decreased, resulting in blurry text and images.

This was less of a problem in the TNT and TNT2 days, when 14” and 15” monitors were most common; 17” was considered high-end and 640x480 and 800x600 were common desktop resolutions. But as technology progressed, CRTs became cheaper, 17” became mainstream, while 19” and 21” monitors could be found at good prices if you looked hard enough. Gamers and enthusiasts began to crank up their screen resolution only to discover that their shiny new GeForce or GeForce2 card didn’t look so good. ATI and Matrox cards provided excellent 2D output: even Voodoo3 and S3 Virge cards delivered better 2D displays than many NVIDIA-based cards!



In came Leadtek with its TDH series of GeForce cards. Not only did they resolve the problem, we actually found that their 2D quality was superior to that of Matrox’s G550 in our WinFast Titanium 500 TDH review.

That innovating spirit from Leadtek continues to this day. Leadtek’s WinFast PX8800 Ultra Leviathan is one of the most unique GeForce 8800 Ultra cards we’ve ever seen, it’s the only single-slot 8800 Ultra on the market. It accomplishes this with water cooling.

Like the ASUS AquaTank, the Leviathan has its own self-contained liquid cooling unit, although in this case it’s a much larger unit that attaches directly to the case itself. The Leviathan is also heavily overclocked, running at 684MHz core/1161MHz memory.

Leadtek isn’t reinventing the wheel with their GeForce 8800 GTX card. The card features the same NVIDIA reference board design and cooling as the other GeForce 8800 GTX cards in this article. Leadtek does however spruce their GTX board up by adding their own custom duct enclosure over the top of the stock NVIDIA cooling unit. The custom Leadtek duct has the same key task as the stock NVIDIA cooler: exhausting hot air from the GPU outside the system case.

Leadtek uses the exact same heatsink/fan unit (with the addition of heatpipes) as the other manufacturers though, so cooling performance is basically the same as the other GTX cards with the obvious addition of the fancier-looking duct enclosure.

If you don’t care for the custom Leadtek enclosure, Leadtek also produced a 100% bone stock GTX card that used the stock NVIDIA ducting enclosure. You may still be able to find a few of these boards floating around at the retail level. Both Leadtek GTX cards run at the stock GeForce 8800 GTX speeds of 575MHz core/1.8GHz memory.