Leadtek WinFast A250 Ultra TD Review March 20, 2002 Tuan Nguyen

Introduction

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It’s about that time of the year again, when things start rolling and rocking, and the world of computer hardware begins to show what’s up its sleeves. Following tradition, NVIDIA announces a new product line early in the new year, and follows up with product refreshes in the fall. While the fall product refreshes are a new product in themselves, they are based on architecture that was launched in the spring.

Well, it’s spring time again and after all the announcements and blitz, we have a product in the labs that not only trumps the competition, but does so with so much brute force that it’s nearly humorous. The good thing about the new GeForce4 products is that they’re shipping a little earlier than GeForce3 or 2 did when they were released. This is mainly due to the fact that NV25 (GeForce4) was already introduced last year, in Microsoft’s Xbox.

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If you’re not first, offer more

The first thing manufacturers do is compete against each other for the first spot on store shelves or on online retailers. Being first to market has both its advantages and disadvantages. While its advantages are somewhat obvious, trying to be first to ship products may mean you have missed something or that you have to compromise your feature set in order to speed up production time.

If you’re going to do it, do it right

This is the case that met Visiontek, who is also known to be the first to ship GeForce3’s early last year. This year, Visiontek is trying to do the same thing but in doing so, it wasn’t able to bundle the software that is suppose to accompany the video card. Missing from the retail box is the software DVD player. While this may or may not be a concern to you and or Visiontek, what’s also missing is extra value added features. Absent are things such as Video-in, hardware monitoring and more efficient cooling.

While this review isn’t about Visiontek, it’s a good example of what can happen when you make hasty decisions. Many times it’s good to stand back and just look at something, wait a bit, and then make a move. What is the benefit of doing this in the computer world? More choices, more freedom, and more satisfying results.

With that, let’s examine Leadtek’s high-end WinFast A250 Ultra TD.


SIDEBAR: The A250’s name comes from NV25. We’re still not quite sure how NV17 got the GeForce4 label though.

Specifications

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Below is a brief rundown of the GeForce4 Titanium specifications which differ from the GeForce4 MX specifications in a few significant areas such as dual Vertex shaders in the Titanium and also how it ironically lacks a few video and TV features that the MX has. One would assume that the Titanium, being the end-all-be-all of NVIDIA product skews, would be a powerhouse that encompasses the features of its subordinates.

nFinite FX engine II
Dual programmable vertex shaders

• Procedural deformations
  
• Real-time hair and fur shading
  
• Key frame animation interpolation
  
• Programmable matrix palette skinning
  
• Morphing
  
• Lens effects: fish eye, wide angle, fresnel effects, water refraction

• Dot3 bump mapping
  
• Anisotropic filtering
  
• Environmental bump mapping (EMBM)
  
• Procedural textures
  
• Per-pixel reflections
  
• Phong-style lighting for per-pixel accuracy

• Accuview technology delivers highest performance an no-penalty Quincunx AA quality
  
• New sub-pixel sample locations provide improved AA quality

• 128MB world's fastest DDR Memory
  
• 10.4 GB/sec Memory Bandwidth
  
• 4.8 Billion AA samples per second fill rate
  
• 136 million vertices/sec Peak Vertex Processing Rate
  
• 1.23 trillion operations/sec
  
• On-board TV-out support up to 1024x768 resolution
  
• On-board DVI support up to 1280x1024 resolution
  
• High-quality HDTV/DVD playback
  
• NVIDIA video processing engine (VPE)
  
• Full acceleration for Microsoft DirectX 8.1 and OpenGL 1.3 ICD
  
• AGP 4X support
  
• Integrated 350MHz RAMDAC, resolution up to 2048x1536 (VGA output), True Color @ 60Hz
  
• WinFastDVD, Colorific, 3Deep, True Internet Color and Cult3D included
  
• Leadtek WinFox system Utility
  
• 2 Full Game Bundled (DroneZ and Gunlok)

The DVI spec

One of the things we expect to see improvde is the current DVI specifications. Developed by Silicon Image, the DVI specification is a true digital video interface designed to deliver high quality graphics from the video card into an LCD display. The current speed varies from 1.65Gbit/sec and up. Theoretically, this base specification supports 1920x1080 at 60Hz and can scale higher with the appropriate bandwidth.

If you notice the specifications on the GeForce4 boards, LCD resolutions are supported only up to 1280x1024. We’re starting to see UXGA LCD panels appearing on notebooks that are capable of 1600x1200 so it won’t be long before those resolutions trickle down into desktop LCDs. Something to note is that it is also possible to have CRT displays that use the DVI interface. This reduces the need for thick cables that are prone to damage and interference.


SIDEBAR: IDF showed a few system demos that had graphics cards hooked up to LCD flat panels by a few strings of fiber wire. I see the light!

Drivers and nView

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nView

New to the Detonator drivers is NVIDIA’s new nView feature. Designed with multiple displays in mind, nView allows you to take advantage of a second monitor, be it an LCD, CRT or TV display. While nView is derived from TwinView, it still hasn’t advanced to the level that we see on Matrox’s DualHead technology. All the new features that are offered in nView that weren’t available in TwinView, are courtesy of drivers and not the actual hardware. We verified this by installing 27.30 drivers on a GeForce3 Titanium 500.

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More Features

Leadtek mentions that it will be releasing another sku of the A250 Ultra board with the TDH extension instead of just TD. TDH stands for TV out/DVI/Hardware monitoring but the board may also include video in as well. We’ve been told that NVIDIA has designed the GeForce4 GPU to be ready for video in board designs as well as video out. Looking at the A250 Ultra TD PCB, there’s a vacant spot for some sort of video ASIC, which presumably is where the video processing chip will sit. When Leadtek releases this side-kick board, users interested in watching TV on their computer can do so through a TV box or VCR that plugs into the A250 Ultra TDH, since the connection to the video card will be either S-Video or RCA composite.


SIDEBAR: I use a Matrox G400 DualHead at work and I must confess, its multi-monitor features are much more robust and powerful than the GeForce4’s.

Compatibility

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Detonator XP and AMD 760MP/MPX

There’s a lot of negative talk about running Detonator drivers that start with version 23.00. Issues have cropped up with dual Athlon systems most often, as many users of this type of system configuration have experienced everything from Windows blue screens to games mysteriously crashing. While this bug isn’t unique to the Leadtek A250 Ultra TD, it is a glaring bug that exists on recent Detonator drivers. A lot of users will experience a blue screen almost immediately after logging into Windows XP with a memory management error. Thankfully, there are two fixes that can be applied, both done manually but one is more difficult and dangerous than the other (but will result in better performance).

The first method, which is easy, can be done by entering the Display Properties > Settings > Advanced > Troubleshoot, unchecking “Enable write combining” and sliding “Hardware acceleration” down to “None”. While this method is relatively quick and painless, the consequences of taking the shortcut are that your video and graphics performance are reduced by a noticeable amount in all areas (2D, 3D and video).

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Onboard Ethernet and SCSI motherboard issues

During our array of compatibility tests, we’ve also found that motherboards that have onboard LAN and or SCSI controllers may have a hard time getting along with GeForce4 boards that sport 128MB of frame buffer. The symptoms creep up when PXE Ethernet functionality is enabled inside the BIOS. Apparently, enabling PXE causes stability issues that can only be resolved by disabling PXE in the BIOS. PXE is an Ethernet function that allows a computer to boot through a network among other useful workstation and server functions. Further testing also reveals this to be a problem on Quadro4 DCC cards as well. Certain motherboards that have both onboard Ethernet and SCSI may also see problems with the SCSI BIOS disappearing during boot when PXE is enabled. This is caused by the GeForce4 occupying all the ROM space (memory allocated to loading system ROMs). Again, these anomalies occur on all 128MB GeForce4 and Quadro4 based cards including the WinFast A250 Ultra TD and its 128MB siblings.


SIDEBAR: My current PC has four Ultra160 SCSI drives striped in RAID 0 that are attached to a U160 SCSI RAID controller with 32MB of cache. Suffice to say, I don’t have any SCSI issues.

System Setup

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Test System

AMD Athlon XP 2000+

ASUS A7V266-E KT266A motherboard

256MB Corsair PC2100 DDR SDRAM

ATI RADEON 8500
ATI RADEON 7500
Driver version 6.13.10.6025

Leadtek WinFast A250 Ultra TD
NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4600 reference board
NVIDIA GeForce4 MX 460 reference board
NVIDIA GeForce3 Ti 500 reference board
NVIDIA GeForce3 Ti 200 reference board
NVIDIA GeForce2 Ti reference board
Driver version Detonator 27.30

30GB IBM Deskstar DTLA 307030 ATA/100 Hard Drive
Pioneer 12X DVD-ROM
Windows XP Professional

DirectX 8.1

Desktop resolution: 1024x768x32

Benchmarks

3DMark 2001
Quake 3 Retail - High Quality
Serious Sam Retail - Normal (32-bit)
Castle Wolfenstein MP Test no compressed textures, (32-bit)


SIDEBAR: MadOnion recently announced PCMark2002, which we’ll likely be taking a look at for our motherboard and CPU articles.

3DMark 2001

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3DMark 2001 – DirectX 8.0

Analysis

The GeForce4 Ti cards start very well and continue to differentiate themselves from the rest of the pack. It’s interesting to see the Radeon keep up so well compared to a GeForce3 Ti. A lot of the internal architecture of the Radeon is efficient as many functions require fewer operations to perform compared to a GeForce3 and even a GeForce4 in some instances. Fortunately, the memory architecture in the GeForce4 Ti along with dual vertex shaders allow it to use brute computing force to take the lead, regardless of whether or not any clever schemes were used in the competition’s offerings.

We’re seeing some good speeds from the A250 Ultra TD, likely do to finalized board layout and design optimizations.


SIDEBAR: Creative Labs plans to hit its competition hard with the acquisition of 3DLabs. Supposedly they have a chip in the works that boasts 76 million transistors and is capable of extreme accuracy and color output – 64-bit color?

3DMark 2001 FPS

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3DMark 2001 – Car Chase

3DMark 2001 – Dragothic

3DMark 2001 – Lobby

3DMark 2001 – Nature

Analysis

The DirectX 8 optimized cards are certainly taking the lead in FPS speeds even though three out of four of the above test categories weren’t DX8 specific. Again we’re seeing the GeForce4 Titanium 4600 cards take front line while the other cards follow. Ironically the GeForce3 Ti steps ahead of the Radeon in real-world FPS performance.


SIDEBAR: If you have two FireWire (1394) and install them into two computers, you can use them to network the two machines via a blistering 400Mbit connection. That’s 4 times faster than 100Mbit Ethernet. And yes, you can use any sort of protocol.

Serious Sam

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Serious Sam – OpenGL

Analysis

OpenGL games seem to start off relatively unexciting at lower resolutions, but then again, with a card like the A250 Ultra TD, you’re likely not going to be playing at 640x480 or 800x600 but rather all the higher resolutions. Entering 1024x768, we start to really see the GeForce4’s take off from the pack leave the next best competitor a whopping 25% behind in speed.


SIDEBAR: I want to take out some of my very old 3D “accelerated” games and play them on the GeForce4 Ti4600 with Quincunx anti aliasing. Imagine the power.

Quake III

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Quake III – High Quality

Analysis

As Quake 3 is another OpenGL benchmark, we’re seeing the same trend here as we saw in Serious Sam. However, the GeForce3 is now ahead of the Radeon in this benchmark but both GeForce4 Ti 4600’s still leave anything else in the dust.


SIDEBAR: Imagine, by John Lennon, is one of the world’s most played songs in all of music history.

Wolfenstein

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Return to Castle Wolfenstein MP Test

Analysis

Because of its emphasis on increased detail, we don’t see any significant differences until we reach fill-rate critical resolutions. Even then, the performance difference is likely to be negligible. The GeForce3 Ti 200 is able to compete very well with the new GeForce4’s signifying either that the Lightspeed memory architecture in both cards are extremely efficient or that RTCW MP test is better suited for chipset/CPU tests.


SIDEBAR: Alan recently encouraged me to listen to Japanese dance/techno-type music and I must say, even though I don’t understand a word, the music is very cool. (as if the words mattered to Tuan in the first place – he listens to K-pop too) – ed

Quake III 2X AA

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Quake III – High Quality 2X AA

Analysis

This is where things get interesting. NVIDIA wasn’t kidding when it was boasting about the GeForce4’s high resolution FSAA abilities. In almost all the tests, the GeForce4 is nearly two times faster than the GeForce3 Ti 500. This is saying a lot as the GeForce3 Ti 500 is no slouch in terms of raw power either. The GeForce4 Ti cards are most definitely the cards to own if you’re hyped about FSAA. This is the first time we’ve seen this type of raw power. Notice that at 1600x1200, the A250 Ultra TD stays well above the comfortable 60FPS mark even with 2X FSAA on. For those who have been preaching that they’d rather play at high resolutions than to use FSAA, well now they can have the best of both worlds.


SIDEBAR: On the subject of Japanese, I recently got new glasses by the Japanese designer Kazuo Kawasaki. These are the coolest frames I have ever worn (and I’ve tried Armani’s, CK, and the whole slew of them).

Quake III Quincunx AA

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Quake III – High Quality Quincunx AA

Analysis

Going from 2X FSAA to Quincunx produces significantly better pictures at negligible performance difference. This is to say that you’re getting 4X FSAA quality at a 2X performance hit. Looking at the graphs, it’s difficult to say that there is even a performance hit, relatively speaking. The GeForce2 cards aren’t able to do Quincunx AA and so no scores are produced.

What’s interesting to look at here is the GeForce4 MX scores. It is suppose to be on the performance level of a GeForce2 Ultra, but with the new Accuview features, the FSAA performance is quite good for its class.


SIDEBAR: With the GeForce4 Ti4600 this powerful, I can’t wait until Sony releases Gran Turismo 3: Professional onto the PC.

Quake III 4X AA

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Quake III – High Quality 4X AA

Analysis

At 4X FSAA, the speed difference between the GeForce4 and 3 reduces, but the relative gap is still very large. The GeForce4’s are indeed the solution for high resolution FSAA gaming.


SIDEBAR: My favorite car to drive in GT3 is the Aston Martin V12 Vanquish. I also drive it in real life… hee…

3DMark 2001 2X AA

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3DMark 2001 – Car Chase

3DMark 2001 – Dragothic

3DMark 2001 – Lobby

3DMark 2001 – Nature

SIDEBAR: Before coming onto FiringSquad, I also wrote for Tweak3D.net and Maximum PC magazine.

3DMark 2001 Quin AA

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3DMark 2001 – Car Chase

3DMark 2001 – Dragothic

3DMark 2001 – Lobby

3DMark 2001 – Nature

SIDEBAR: NVIDIA now uses HRAA or High resolution anti aliasing and employs a slightly different method for AA quality than was done with Quincunx. Instead of using the four corners of each pixel, HRAA now slightly shifts the corners slightly towards the centers of the pixels in order to get smoother lines while retaining overall image quality.

Overclocking

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GeForce4 Titanium 4600 Overclocking

Looking at the A250 Ultra TD, you immediately come to the conclusion that this card is likely to overclock much better than other cards that simply rely on small active heatsinks for the GPU. This large heatsink has not 1 but 2 fans to cool the GPU and the heatsink itself is almost as large as the card. Leadtek doesn’t stop there though; it has added another large passive heatsink on the back of the card, with half of it slightly raised over the GPU area.

Noticing that there was plenty of space on the back of the A250, we decided to attach a 60x60x10mm fan on it for extra cooling. After all was complete, we proceeded to set the card’s core and memory speed with the final setting being 338MHz for core and 775MHz for memory! After quickly testing some short term stability with the 3D screen savers in Windows, we were left with a stable, overclocked A250 Ultra, Ultra, TD (for the lack of words).






Analysis
We’re noticing more improvements at the lower resolutions because at higher ones, greater fillrate is required. But overall, the gains are relatively small and most of the time we’re pulling in an average of 10FPS. Nevertheless, this proves one thing and that is that NVIDIA has engineered an extremely efficient GPU. The only methods left to be done in order to see significant changes are increase the core speed significantly with a new GPU revision coupled with faster memory, and or wait for NV30.


SIDEBAR: Anyone reading this love watching anime? My new current favorite: Maison Ikkoku, an all-time classic. Marcus showed me quite a few good series (including Maison Ikkoku) and all of them have been thoroughly addicting.

Ballistics Report

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Pros

Accuview: FSAA is probably the most significantly improved feature on the GeForce4 Titanium. It’s extremely fast, and you also get a high quality 4X mode that enables anisotropic filtering for better than standard 4X FSAA quality. Gone are the worries of performance hits and in are the days of glorious high resolution, full scene anti aliased gaming.

nView: While not a revolutionary feature, nView evolves over TwinView in its driver features as well as dual monitor controllers for true independent display. Couple that with 128MB of available onboard frame buffer and you’ll have no worries about running 1600x1200x32 on each display, or higher. One of the many extra features that complement the dual monitors support is the multi-desktop function. Using customizable hot-keys, you can flip back and forth from as many as 32 independent desktops. There are a few little quirks in multi-desktop though, like if you open My Computer on multiple desktops, moving one of them on any of the desktops will move the same window on the other screens as well. Preferably, we would have liked if each desktop had its own icon and window positions.

Dual vertex and pixel shaders: All the raw speed is care of the new Lightspeed memory design as well as faster core and memory speeds, but FPS performance isn’t everything. With the new dual vertex shaders, you’re able to witness many new special effects that previously weren’t available. You can be sure many of these new effects will debut in Doom 3 or similar. No other card comes close to the feature set of the GeForce4.

Cooling: Leadtek has gone a few extra steps to include an extravagant (but not useless) heatsink that sends chills down the GeForce4’s pipelines. Not only is the behemoth cooling the GPU, it’s also cooling the BGA memory packs on both sides of the PCB. This is also the first time we’ve seen a retail consumer graphics product come with two fans. Leadtek could have added another fan on the back of the video card, but that would reach ridiculous levels.

Visuals: The same razor sharp 2D (that we discussed in our Leadtek WinFast GeForce3 Ti 500 review) visuals are standard on all the latest GeForce3 and 4 products from Leadtek.

All things included: Leadtek has included all the things that it has promised to include inside the retail package. Software DVD player, games, and all the necessary cables and documentations are included.

Cons

Price: Price is going to be an issue for many. A quick search on PriceWatch revealed the A250 Ultra TD starts around $400 and steadily climbing to about $30 more. Interestingly, we also saw a post for a GeForce4 Ti 4400 card with a price of $289. The difference is more than $100 and while we think the performance may not be worth the price difference, we’ll reserve final judgment until a Ti 4400 is in our hands.

Compatibility: We want to make it clear that the issues we brought up aren’t exclusive to the A250 Ultra TD, but in fact, exist on all 128MB GeForce4 and Quadro4 products. While most of you out there are running single processor solutions, there have been quite a few discussions about SMP users having difficulty with the latest Detonator drivers. As for ROM space issues, it’s likely up to BIOS vendors to do their homework on validation and testing.


SIDEBAR: I also tested the GeForce4 Ti4600 and Quadro4 DCC 750 on a Tyan Thunder K7 board with equally blistering benchmarks. The Quadro was slower than the Ti4600 though.

Final Verdict

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