Specs/First Impressions

First off, the specs list for the Siluro 256 GTS is pretty much the same as every other GeForce 2 GTS card. Here's a quick recap of some of the more important specs for the GeForce 2 core:

Quick specs

NVIDIA GeForce 2 GTS GPU
256-bit graphics engine
200MHz core/166MHz memory clock
25 million triangles/sec
800 Mpixels/s fill rate
1.6GTexels/sec fill rate
5.3GB/sec Memory bandwidth
350MHz RAMDAC
Max Resolution 2048x1536
64MB DDR SDRAM

First Impressions

Being an ABIT video card, we half expected the Siluro 256 GTS to ship with the graphics core and memory overclocked. However, this wasn't the case. Instead, ABIT ships the Siluro with a software overclocking utility. We'll discuss this in more depth later in the review.

Initially, we were a bit perplexed by the name "Siluro 256 GTS." In the case of regular GeForce boards, the "256" designation is frequently used by card manufacturers. Likewise, the "GTS" moniker is used for GeForce 2 cards. When ABIT officially announced the name of the Siluro 256 GTS, we didn't know if it was a card based on the GeForce 256 core, or the GeForce 2 GTS. In our opinion, a better name would have been "Siluro 2 GTS."

The board

The Siluro 256 GTS follows the same basic reference design we've seen on all the 64MB cards in the fact that SDRAM memory is used rather than SGRAM. While DDR SDRAM costs less for manufacturers to purchase, it also performs a bit slower.

6ns SDRAM

In the case of our board, 6ns chips from Hyundai was used. With the use of 6ns chips, the memory on the Siluro is rated for 166MHz, matching the specs of NVIDIA's reference design. ABIT uses the same circular heatsink/fan we've seen on many other boards, unlike the Hercules 3D Prophet II however, heatsinks aren't used on the memory chips. Since the benefits of the Hercules heatsink implementation is pretty debatable, we consider both boards to be equal from this perspective.

In addition to the VGA connector, the Siluro 256 GTS has an S-Video Out connector for hooking the video card up to your TV. We hardly ever use the TV-out connections included on our video cards, but if you've ever dreamed of big screen gaming, the option is there with the Siluro 256 GTS.