Closer Look

The deep-blue-colored PCB is nearly an exact copy of ATI’s reference design, which may mean good 2D quality and moderate overclocking potential. The cooler is a solid-looking thing. It resembles the ones ASUS mounts on some of its graphics cards.

Don’t let the color mislead you: the heatsink is made of painted aluminum. The fan’s blades are supposed to shine in ultraviolet light.

The PCB carries eight memory chips from Samsung, marked as K4D263238E-GC2A. In Samsung’s reading, 2A stands for 2.8ns access time. The memory works at 600MHz (300MHz DDR), while the GPU – at 400MHz. In the upper part of the board, you can see a caption with the name of the card, the Gigabyte logo, and the revision number. We have a card featuring revision 1.0.

Overclocking, Noise and 2D Image Quality

Compared to FIC R96P, the GV-R96P128D has a noticeably louder cooler. At least, the difference between them is perceivable by the ear. On the other hand, it does its job better than the humble cooler of the FIC R96P. The result is more successful overclocking. After removing the thermal pad (hated by all overclockers, I presume), I managed to speed up the core to 510MHz. Excellent! The memory couldn’t keep the tempo, though, as it allowed speeding it up to 680MHz (340MHz DDR) only. It didn’t even make it to its own specs – 700MHz (350MHz DDR). Any other 10MHz above that resulted into all sorts of hideous artifacts in the onscreen picture. As for 2D quality, it didn’t disappoint. The card produced a good picture in all resolutions up to 1600x1200@85Hz. Thus, the only drawback of the Gigabyte GV-R96P128D I’ve found so far is a relatively noisy, although quite efficient, cooler.

Contemporary Mass Graphics Cards Handling Full-Screen Anti-Aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering

Our today’s tests will show the effect of full-screen anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering on mainstream graphics cards. Thus, we will be able to estimate the cards efficiency in each work mode. An NVIDIA GeForce FX 5600 Ultra graphics card, working at 400/800MHz core and memory frequencies, will be the reference point for the Gigabyte GV-R96P128D.

The testbed configuration has changed somewhat since our last review. Now it consists of :

• AMD Athlon XP 3200+ “Barton” CPU (2.2GHz, 400MHz FSB);
• ABIT NF7-S mainboard v.2.0;
• 2x256MB Corsair XMS3200 DDR SDRAM (2-3-3-6, 400MHz);
• Maxtor DiamondMax Plus D740X HDD, 2MB buffer, 40GB;
• NVIDIA MCP-T audio;
• Microsoft Windows XP SP1;
• Drivers: ATI Catalyst 3.7, NVIDIA Detonator 45.23.

We used the following benchmarking software:

• Quake 3: Arena v1.32;
• Return to Castle Wolfenstein v1.4;
• Unreal Tournament 2003 v2225;
• Star Trek: Elite Force 2;
• Serious Sam: The Second Encounter;
• Splinter Cell;
• Futuremark 3DMark 2001SE Build 330;
• Futuremark 3DMark03;
• CodeCult CodeCreatures;
• Aquamark 3.

The graphics quality was set to maximum in every test. We ran the tests three times each: in “default” mode, with FSAA 4x and with FA 8x. We didn’t adjust the texture quality settings as these provide a too small performance gain with a RADEON GPU. A few extra fps aren’t worth the quality loss.