The WinFast A360 Ultra TDH card

At first glance, Leadtek’s WinFast A360 Ultra TDH looks dramatically different than eVGA’s e-GeForce FX 5700 Ultra, which is produced directly by NVIDIA (via Flextronics). But actually, if you take a closer look at the board you’ll see that not only is the board design identical, so are the board’s components and power circuitry. Quite honestly, this didn’t come as to much of a surprise to us; the first wave of review boards is usually based on the reference design. In fact, you can even see the outline where the reference GeForce FX 5700 Ultra heatsink sits on the board’s PCB. Therefore wouldn’t be shocked if the WinFast A360 Ultra TDH was built at the same facility as the e-GeForce FX 5700 Ultra.

Leadtek WinFast A360 Ultra TDH

Back of the card

A closer look at the dust filter

Leadtek chose to omit Philips’ encoder chip, just like the eVGA board. The VGA market is so cutthroat that card manufacturers have to save costs wherever they can. Consumers often go with the cheapest board they can find, and sometimes overlook or just don’t want features such as video input, especially when you’re dealing with the mainstream market. Card manufacturers will then go back and add in extra goodies like video inputs or dual DVI interfaces on their second generation boards, where features play a more significant role than price. Leadtek will also be producing a 256MB variant of the WinFast A360.

128MB or 256MB configurations

No video input support here

Same board design

That doesn’t mean Leadtek skimped on their WinFast A360 Ultra TDH board however. Rather than stick with NVIDIA’s reference cooler, they’ve come up with a unit of their own design which features an integrated dust filter! This is the mesh grille you see covering the fan in the pictures.

By adding a dust filter, dust and grime are kept away from collecting on the fan’s blades, ensuring efficient operation, which equals more effective cooling. The filter also keeps dust away from the fan’s motor, which can cause it to operate at higher temperatures, and potentially shorten its lifespan. We’re still baffled why more card manufacturers haven’t followed Leadtek’s lead and integrated dust filters on their products. (Also remember that you should clean the filter periodically, which can easily be removed with a small Philips screwdriver. Otherwise, there’s really no point in it being there.)

Rather than use a one-piece design with their heatsink, Leadtek has separate heatsinks cooling the card’s DDR2 memory modules. This is probably a good thing, as we’ve found that DDR2 modules operate much warmer than DDR, this three-piece design prevents the heat from the core from spreading to the memory modules, and vice versa.

In operation, we recorded an idle temperature of 36 degrees Celsius for the WinFast A360 Ultra TDH, this compares very favorably to the e-GeForce FX 5700 Ultra, which was running at 44 degrees. Under load the Leadtek card hit 46 degrees Celsius, while the eVGA card was operating at 58 degrees. Therefore, with such a remarkable performance difference, we think it’s pretty safe to say that Leadtek’s built the better cooling solution; noise levels on both cards was very similar.

Included in the WinFast A360 Ultra TDH’s packaging are copies of GunMetal and Big Mutha Truckas, not exactly the most cutting-edge games, but in the box nonetheless. Leadtek also includes its hardware monitoring and overclocking software, WinFox II.