Leadtek WinFast GeForce 2 GTS

The Card

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The most visually shocking aspect of the Leadtek WinFast GeForce 2 GTS is, without a doubt, its enormous heatsink. Judging by the size of the heatsink, a whopping 7.5 x 6 cm (compared to the 4.5 x 4.5 cm heatsink found on most video cards), Leadtek must have received great response from their WinFast GeForce 256 DDR Revision B card, their first product to employ an extremely oversized cooling solution. The problem is that the huge heatsink on the WinFast GeForce 2 GTS serves essentially no purpose besides impressing friends, a moot point considering that the card is placed inside the computer. We noticed a large improvement when overclocking the WinFast GeForce 256 DDR Revision B card due to its oversized heatsink, but due to the nature of the GeForce 2 GTS chip, this improvement is all but gone, even with the use of thermal grease to bond the heatsink to the GPU.

Unlike the GeForce 256 GPU, the GeForce 2 GTS with its .18 micron architecture, does not get extremely hot. By shrinking the die size of the chip, NVIDIA was able to significantly reduce the amount of heat produced in the core. Due to this reduction of the die size, the GeForce 2 GTS no longer runs at temperatures hot enough to burn a person's skin. Instead, a normal sized heatsink on a GeForce 2 GTS has temperatures that are only hot to the touch. By employing a heatsink that is "220% greater" in size than the standard heatsink, Leadtek was able to reduce this temperature even further, so that the heatsink is room temperature to the touch, however, this additional drop in heat does not produce any additional overclockability, as shown and discussed in the overclocking section.

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Heatsink aside, we can move on to the more conventional aspects of the card. Like every other GeForce 2 GTS-based card we have seen out there, the Leadtek WinFast GeForce 2 GTS is based upon NVIDIA's reference design for board layout. Most manufacturers chose this route for one reason: less production costs. By maintaining NVIDIA's reference design, Leadtek was able to produce a card without the added production time associated with producing a proprietary board design. In order to be a contender in the quickly paced world of video cards, it is necessary to get a product out in the hands of the consumer as soon as possible. By utilizing the reference design, no additional research and development is needed, meaning that production time and production cost are decreased. Both of these factors are essential for the production of a new video card.

The card utilizes the same memory solution we have seen in every DDR card since the original DDR GeForce 256. Using eight, 4 MB Infineon DDR SGRAM chips rated at 6 ns, we can expect the RAM on the WinFast GeForce 2 GTS to perform similarly to the memory clock on other recent video cards. It seems that long gone are the days when DDR SGRAM chips would rarely break their rated speed limit of 166 MHz DDR (333 MHz). Since the memory clock of the card is shipped at this 333 MHz mark, you can be certain that the problems that plagued the initial DDR memory batches are gone. Also worth noting is the fact that, currently, the Infineon SGRAM chips only come in the 6 ns variety. This should change later in the summer when Infineon plans on releasing 5.5 and 5 ns SGRAM chips for use in GeForce 2 GTS cards.

One option not seen on our test card but one that is available nonetheless is TV-out. Sold as an in-box option and not an upgrade module like other companies, the video-out version of this card is slated to run a mere $10 more than the base price of $349. Costing a small fraction of the total card cost, it seems that even if you do not plan on utilizing the video-out, it would be a nice feature to have at a nice price. A DVI port on the back is an option as well.