Today we suggest reviewing one more graphics card on NVIDIA GeForce 256 chipset, which turned up a bit late, actually. Itis still a rather interesting piece, because it is one of ABIT's first tries in the graphics field (besides, i740 based graphicscards). A lot of users worldwide are fond of ABIT mainboards and admire their high quality as well as numerous outstandingattractive features. We still remember ABIT BH6, BX6 2.0, BE6, BE6-II and many others, which offer overclockers new hugeopportunities for CPU overclocking. And now ABIT decided to enter the graphics market, too. To be more exact, we shouldactually say that ABIT Siluro GF256 is ABIT's second graphics card. The first one was Siluro GT2 built on NVIDIA Riva TNT2Ultra chipset, however, it appeared too late and hence didn't have any chance to succeed. Although great success of ABITSiluro GF256 is also quite doubtful: this card comes out in the middle of the year 2000 when the cards on GeForce 256 withDDR memory have already become much cheaper. Nevertheless, ABIT promises us that their newcomer will be able to prove verycool due to an extraordinary approach applied. So, we are quite curious to see what it is worth...

Closer Look

Here is a list of ABIT Siluro GF256 key features:

• NVIDIA Geforce256, 256-bit 2D/3D graphics processor
• 32MB SDRAM
• AGP 2x/4x
• 350MHz RAMDAC
• 2D Video Modes:
  
  

  Resolution	Color Depth (bits)	Max Refresh Rate (Hz)
  640 x 480	8/16/32	240
  800 x 600	8/16/32	240
  960 x 720	8/16/32	200
  1024 x 768	8/16/32	200
  1152 x 864	8/16/32	200/200/170
  1280 x 1024	8/16/32	170/170/150
  1600 x 900	8/16/32	150/150/120
  1600 x 1200	8/16/32	120/120/100
  1920 x 1200	8/16/32	100/100/85
  2048 x 1536	8/16/32	75/75/60

Let's discuss the peculiarities of this graphics card in detail:

The card is based on AGP 2x/4x interface, has 32MB SDR SDRAM located in 16 chips on both sides of the PCB.

Memory microchips are made by ESMT and feature 5ns access time, which implies that this memory can work at 200MHz.NVIDIA advises using 166MHz memory in graphics cards with SDR-memory that is why the nominal memory working frequency onthis card is reduced to 166MHz (as well as on other cards of the same type).

The graphics card chipset works at 120MHz, which is a standard frequency for all GeForce 256 based cards.

The design of ABIT Siluro GF256 corresponds fully to the reference design. The PCB is of ABIT's typical rich yellow color.

The card is equipped with a high quality cooler with ball bearings in the fan construction. To our great disappointment thecompany didn't care to provide a layer of thermal paste (or at least a piece of thermal tape) between the chipset surface andthe heatsink. As you can easily guess, even a perfect cooler won't guarantee the desired cooling effect in this case and thechipset overclocking will turn out absolutely impossible.

If you take a closer look at the card's PCB, you will definitely notice a LCD controller chip (by Silicon Image) and LCDoutput port. Besides, there is also a TV-Out with BrookTree 869 controller chip. Unfortunately, the card we tested was equippedonly with S-Video out and no composite :-( , which has already become a disappointing tradition. There were no converters in thepackage that is why you will hardly be able to make use of this TV-Out with not very up-to-date video equipment.

ABIT Siluro GF256 is supplied in a pretty originally designed box (we wonder what ABIT wanted to say by the decorations likethat: torn out man's eyeballs?).

The package includes three CDs: a CD with the drivers and utilities, TestDrive 5 game and Shogo game. The disk with thedrivers contains a software WinDVD player ver. 1.3.5. Besides, in the box you can also find a relatively long S-Video cable,but as we have already said, no S-Video-to-Composite converter.

Overclocking

And now a few words about overclocking. We did our best and as a result managed to overclock the chipset on our ABIT SiluroGF256 up to 155MHz. However, we had to spread a bit of thermal paste between the chipset and the heatsink, otherwise we wouldn'tget anything even close to 155MHz. As for memory, we overclocked it to 220MHz. Of course, it is not the absolute maximum (thereare some ASUS AGP-V6600 cards capable of running at 160/220MHz), however, it is still a bit higher than what we usually get onthe ordinary GeForce 256 based cards. In the first place this is due to fast memory installed in ABIT Siluro GF256. So, thisincrease in working frequencies should undoubtedly tell greatly on the overall system performance.

What happens if we increase AGP working frequency? As you know, i440BX chipset provides AGP with 1/1 or 2/3 of the systembus frequency, which restricts the use of FSB frequencies over 100MHz on this kind of mainboards. That is why very often someAGP graphics cards do not work at AGP frequencies over 75MHz. If we set the FSB frequency of our i440BX mainboard equal to133MHz, we will get 89MHz AGP, which may turn out dangerous for some graphics cards. We have already had experience with somegraphics cards, which worked perfectly at such high frequencies, however, ABIT Siluro GF256 doesn't belong to these ones. Atthe FSB frequency equal to 133MHz the card didn't work at all: the system hung up as soon as we started any 3D application.

Installation and Drivers

At first, look through the testbed configuration we used:

• Intel Pentium III 600MHz CPU;
• ASUS P3B-F (i440BX) mainboard;
• 128MB PC100 system memory;
• Quantum FB CR 6.4GB HDD;
• ViewSonic P810 (21") monitor;
• Windows 98.

The series of screenshots below will give you a better idea of the drivers supplied together with the graphics card. Forour tests we used ver. 3.65:

As you can see, these drivers are a copy of the same version of the reference drivers from NVIDIA, that's why all the furtherscreenshots duplicate the reference properties pages. In fact, the situation is very similar to what we had with GigabyteGA-GF2560. However, there are still a few differences, which are worth mentioning. After we installed the drivers thereappeared a special tray icon, which opened the properties menu when clicked:

Besides, you can also access the settings via display properties. This allows you to operate 3D-functions options andto configure TV-Out settings:

Note that ABIT software developers removed overclocking options from the properties pages and offered a separate utilitycalled ABIT Graphics MAX:

Here you can set the chipset working frequency to 150MHz, and the memory working frequency - to 210MHz. And that's all. Noother options are possible. So, we can't actually make out why ABIT developed this utility, which does not offer anything newcompared to the drivers from NVIDIA.

Since they used reference drivers almost as they were and didn't introduce any significant changes (which can be clearlysee from the file names coinciding with the reference drivers files), there is no need to speak about the performance difference:drivers do not tell. And in our performance tests we will use ABIT drivers ver. 3.65.

Performance

At first comes 2D graphics. As we have already mentioned in the reviews devoted to NVIDIA GeForce256 chipset and the cardson this chipset, the fastness and quality of 2D graphics provided by those graphics cards could meet the demands of practicallyall users. No doubt, ABIT Siluro GF256 proves it.

We will use the following two games to consider the card's performance in 3D graphics:

Rage Expendable (Direct3D, multitexturing);id Software Quake3 v.1.16h (OpenGL, multitexturing).

These tools should be quite enough to show the graphics card performance. For a more illustrative comparison we added theperformance of two more graphics cards on GeForce 256 chipset with SDR SDRAM to our diagrams: ASUS AGP-V6600 and GigabyteGA-GF2560. We will also show the performance of overclocked ABIT Siluro GF256.

The diagrams show that ABIT Siluro GF256 is a really cool product on NVIDIA GeForce 256 chipset equipped with SDR-memory.We would like to mention once again an essential drawback of the cards like that: tangible performance drop in 32bit colormode caused by the use of SDR-memory instead of DDR. And as for the positive results, we should mention a rather impressiveperformance growth of the overclocked ABIT Siluro GF256.

If you are a DVD-video fan, you probably know that NVIDIA GeForce 256 chipset features all the necessary things for highquality DVD-video playback. The graphics card is accompanied by a software DVD-player - WinDVD 1.3.5, which prepared us avery unexpected surprise. As soon as we installed it, we were totally discouraged by the following message:

Frankly speaking, we couldn't understand the purpose of providing the card with a version, which required a serial number(the number was stuck to the CD-package) but at the same time was none other but a trial version. Therefore we had to testour graphics card with WinDVD player version 2.00, which is cool at working with GeForce 256. As we had expected, DVDplayback proved perfect. The CPU utilization during DVD movies playback on this player made only 40% at the most.

Unfortunately, we failed to estimate the quality of the available TV-Out because of the absence of a Composite on thiscard.

Conclusions

Summing up we would like to say that ABIT Siluro GF256 is a good product, which can easily find its niche in thegraphics market. However, we have to bear in mind that manufacturing graphics cards intended for slow SDR-memory willone day end up in a deadlock. Now we don't know anything about the cost of this card, and if it appears not lower thanthe cost of competing products, then we wouldn't recommend you to hunt for it. Moreover, we don't see any peculiaroverclocking features promised by ABIT, which is very strange since ABIT is famous for its innovations and this timeit appeared just as any other average manufacturer.

But we have to point out that even if the price is quite low, the success of ABIT Siluro GF256 is still very doubtful,because the prices on the cards with DDR-memory keep dropping and the gap between the cards with SDR and DDR-memory is aboutto disappear. So, you should think twice before purchasing a card with SDR-memory...

Highs:

• Relatively high performance compared to analogues, guaranteeing fast gaming
• Good overclockability
• High quality mounting, which ensures reliable and stable work

Lows:

• No Composite TV-Out
• Neglectfully composed software set, which includes outdated game versions and a not working DVD-player
• No unique features so typical of all ABIT products