Gainward Ti/450 GS
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SpecificationsAs you can see, it's standard GF2 Ti fare with TV-Out. Gainward make it stand out from the crowd with the very red PCB and red GPU cooler but apart from that, it's pretty standard. The extras from this card will come in the form of the overclocking.  Card Installation and Drivers Card installation couldn't have been simpler. Remove the old card from the system and screw in the new one. The operating system was freshy installed as always but if you were coming from an old card, make sure to uninstall the old cards drivers first. WindowsXP identifies the card as a GeForce2 DDR and pointing device manager at a freshly unzipped copy of the 22.40 Detonator XP drivers correctly identified the card as a GeForce2 Ti. As you know, a stipulation for calling the new cards Ti's is that they run the new DetonatorXP drivers which expose some new features as well as exposing some extra speed. A reboot later and everything is working perfectly. Performance We'll be looking at the card from two angles. The first will be standard out of the box clocks and then we'll look at performance when overclocked. Like our Gainward Ti550 review, we'll present both datasets in the same graph where possible to let us present all the same information without you having to scroll through loads of graphs. This is still a new review format for us here at Hexus so if you like the old style of seperate stock and overclocked sections then let us know. Before we look at the test system, I'll just go over briefly how I overclocked the card. RivaTuner RC8 was used and for the first time in overclocking an NVIDIA card I used the new low level overclocking feature it introduced in RC8. This sets the clocks directly without reinitialising the card and seems to work perfectly well. When we overclocked the Sparkle and Prolink cards in our shootout, the clock range they managed to achieve was around 266/466 so I was looking for a bit more from the Gainward since a few cards that I've seen or heard about overclocked very well. The maximum overclocked speed that managed to run the full suite of tests was 280/515 and you can see the clocks in the following screenshot. While the card went higher for Quake3 and also UT, it was the lowest common clock that ran all the benchmarks.  Lets take a look at the test system.
 Here we see a 650 point increase from the overclock and over 500 marks ahead of either Prolink or Sparkle cards out of the box. However, the Sparkle and Prolink cards were run on a 1.7Ghz Pentium4 with DDR memory which is slower than our KT266A and XP1800 so if we compensate for the platform disadvantage the other cards had, we can estimate that out of the box performance would be very similar to the other cards. The Prolink would have the advantage due to its higher out of the box memory clock of 444Mhz. However, overclocked the Gainward is the best performer. It overclocks a fair bit higher than either Prolink or Sparkle card and the 650 point increase just from overclocking the card is very welcome as the performance is effectively free. Next up we have Quake3, our lone OpenGL benchmark. The engine is fairly old and doesn't need a DirectX 8 class accelerator to perform very well. The engine was designed for this GPU initially so performance on a platform like the KT266A with a fast XP is obviously very good.  The Pentium4 is a strong processor when running Quake3 but still the KT266A and XP1800 give the Gainward a speed advantage over the other 2 cards. Obviously given identical platforms the cards would perform roughly similar. However, like we saw with 3DMark, the clock speed advantage the Gainward has when overclocked makes it the leader out of the three cards. Performance increases handily at all resolutions, especially as the resolution is increased. As you increase the resolution the card has to work harder and the fillrate performance of the card comes into play a lot more. Therefore the increased core clock and increased memory clock giving more memory bandwidth help the card a lot here. Performance at all resolutions is excellent and you'd have no problems at all using a KT266A, 1800XP and the Gainward to play at 1600x1200 with all rendering features enabled. Unreal Tournament is our DirectX 7 based benchmark and so doesn't require any new rendering features. Like we've discussed a lot before, Unreal Tournament is heavily CPU bound and the performance figures appear to be low. However the performance is fine with the lowest and highest frame rates during the runs we do with the Thunder demo not differing by very much. Performanc is very smooth with little deviation from the average frame rates shown in the graph.  As we can see, the performance is fine at all resolutions with the lowest average frame rate being just a shade under 50fps at 1600x1200. The three cards would perform pretty much identically out of the box on the same platform with the Gainward winning out when overclocked. However with UT, overclocking the card does very little since the engine spends most of its time on the CPU. Nothing really exciting to see here sadly. Lastly we have Aquamark. Aquamark is based on Aquanox, the underwater shooter from Massive Development. It's heavily dependant on a DX8 class accelerator for the best performance and traditionally on the GeForce2, overclocking the card doesn't do very much since the game spends a lot of its time on the CPU since the card doesn't do the pixel and vertex shader in hardware.  On the Pentium4 1.7Ghz and DDR (VIA P4X266 chipset), the Prolink and Sparkle cards struggled to break 20fps even when overclocked. However on the KT266A the Gainward has no such problems with the scores both in the upper half of the 20-30fps range. Balancing out the platforms and the Gainward would win due to it's higher overclocked speeds. However the performance delta would be so small since on the GF2 the underlying CPU performance is the deciding factor in Aquamark performance. You really need a DX8 class card to get the most from Aquamark and the Ti's struggle at the test resolution of 1024x768. Performance Conclusion Out of the box performance is excellent on the non DX8 games and even on 3DMark it wouldn't be too hard to break into the 6K range with some tweaking of the the driver and a little overclock of the processor. Aquamark is the only benchmark on which the cards struggle and it's to be expected given the age of the GPU and the features it supports. It simply doesn't do enough in hardware for the benchmark to perform well and a drop in resolution would be needed for Aquanox to play well. In a game like Quake3 the performance is stellar and high framerates are easily achieved with all rendering features turned on. Maybe it's time for a new OpenGL benchmark since performance, even on lowly accelerators in the £100 price range are capable of playing Q3 at massive framerates. In future reviews we'll hopefully be showing Serious Sam 2 as another alternate OpenGL benchmark alongside Quake3 to give you an idea of OpenGL performance in current game engines. Overclocked, the Gainward is simply the fastest GeForce2 based card we've seen at Hexus and the overclock was comfortable. Many cards go even higher and ramsinks are a worth edition to the 4.5ns memory and are a recommended modification if you are that way inclined. It beats both Prolink and Sparkle cards easily when overclocked. Conclusion So what do we think of the Gainward overall? Lets look at the features first. It's on a par with the other GF2 Ti's that we've tested in that they all feature TV-Out in addition to the monitor outputs and none of the 3 cards actively or passively cool the memory chips. However the Gainward goes that little bit further than the other two when overclocked. Bundle wise, all 3 are very similar with DVD player software and a TV-Out cable being all that's bundled with all three cards. They really are competing on price alone and with the Gainward available in the UK from a number of retailers for around £110, given that it overclocks a fair bit more than the others, I can't help but recommend it over the other two. If price is crucial, the Gainward may not be the best choice, especially if you wish to run at stock card speeds. The only other choices at this price point are other GeForce2 Ti's and the Radeon 7500 which also offers excellent performance and also dual display capability and class leading DVD playback. I'm a fan of this little card and for the price you can't really go far wrong. Excellent card from Gainward, again with their twists, especially when overclocking. If it matches your budget, I recommend it whole heartedly. A DX8 class card however is recommended if you can afford to purchase one. |
