Leadtek is a relatively new figure in the graphics card world, but it has already won its niche in this market. Unlike the pricy cards from ASUS with a heap of different features or cheap products by unknown brands, graphics cards from Leadtek have always symbolized a favorable combination of a pleasantly low price and an impressive bunch of accessory functions.

This review is devoted to a really interesting item - WinFast GeForce3 TD, the flagship of Leadtek's WinFast graphics family.

Closer Look & Overclocking

Leadtek WinFast GeForce3 TD cards are shipped in a retail package:

The card is provided with a brief and detailed manuals in English, RCA and S-Video cables, RCA -to-S-Video adapter and two CDs with drivers and utilities:

Leadtek WinFast GeForce3 TD is made according to the reference design of NVIDIA - on a green-lacquered textolite:

   

It is equipped with NVIDIA GeForce3 rev. A5 chip and 64MB graphics DDR SDRAM from EliteMT with 3.8ns access time:

BTW, on the box we read "4ns DDR Ultra Speed". We guess, it's for the first time that Leadtek deliberately "underestimates" the technical characteristics of its cards :).

The heatsinks on the memory chips are deadly glued, unlike those on Leadtek WinFast GeForce2 Ultra, for example, but they're still of the same shape:

All this stuff looks really nice, but let us remind you that the memory chips on NVIDIA GeForce3 cards get much more overheated than those on other graphics cards. Well, although the "bars" on this card's memory chips do get strongly overheated - stronger than ribbed heatsinks on similar graphics cards, - they cope with their work quite successfully.

The core cooling system of GeForce3 looks great too: the thick foot and vast surface of the heatsink ensure perfect air circulation.

In spite of all these promising features, the card's overclocking abilities have proven rather modest: the top frequencies are 240MHz for the core and 480MHz for the memory compared with the nominal 200MHz and 460MHz respectively.

Leadtek WinFast GeForce3 TD is provided with S-Video and DVI Outs. CX25871 chip from Conexant codes the video signal into different TV formats:

If we compare CX25871 with the popular Bt868/869 chips, we'll see that it is a smarter solution which is pin-compatible with these two chips but boasts a broader range of functions.

It supports HDTV standard (providing almost twice as clear vertical and horizontal graphics than all the other standards), from 320x200 to 1024x768 output resolution, adaptive flicker filtering with automatically adjusted filtering rate in different applications and even different screen areas if there are several applications running at a time. Furthermore, CX25871 supports PAL B/D/G/H/I/M/N, NTSC and SECAM (!) B/G/D/K/K1/H/L TV formats.

We have paid so much attention to CX25871 because Microsoft has chosen this chip for its Xbox gaming consoles, where CX25871 will be responsible for image output to the TV screen.

Frankly speaking, Leadtek WinFast GeForce3 TD didn't turn out up to our expectations as far as its TV-Out goes: we expected something extraordinary, but alas... We'll raise this problem in a corresponding section of our review.

Image output to the DVI-Out is controlled by SII164CT64 chip:

Testbed

For our investigation we assembled the following testbed:

• AMD Athlon 1.2GHz (133MHz FSB) CPU;
• EPoX 8KTA3 (VIA KT133A based) mainboard;
• 256MB NCP PC133 SDRAM;
• Fujitsu MPE3084AE 8.4GB HDD.

Software:

• Windows 98 SE build 4.10.2222 A;
• DirectX8.0a;
• Quake 3 Arena v1.27g.

As a driver, we took Detonator 12.60.

Drivers and Utilities Involved

On the first CD, together with Detonator 12.00, we found a brand WinFox utility from Leadtek (it would be correct to refer to it as a set of utilities called WinFox). There are so many of them that we won't spotlight each utility separately. Instead, we'll place several screenshots with brief comments of ours:

When WinFox is installed, in the system tray you'll find an icon displaying the following menu when clicked on:

The most interesting and useful points are "Hot References" and "Advanced Tools":

  

It's nice that WinFox works with all the versions of Detonator drivers. It doesn't add much fun to their regular functions, though. WinFox just gathers all the functions dealing with the desktop, screensaver and such-like settings in one place. Those who are fond of this sort of arrangements will surely like it, but we didn't feel very sorry when the WinFox icon in the lower right corner of the screen disappeared after the test session was over.

Alongside with WinFox and a DVD player, the CDs contain a regular bunch of utilities, which help to adjust the display working mode for different applications: Colorific, True Internet Color and 3Deep from E-Color.

2D Image Quality, TV-Out

Leadtek WinFast GeForce3 TD showed very good image quality, which is actually a common thing for almost all the NVIDIA GeForce3 based graphics cards. As we had expected, the image quality turned out no worse than that of NVIDIA GeForce3, GeForce2 or GeForce2 MX based cards, but not appreciably better. Here's what we saw on the TV-screen (SONY Trinitron KV-21FX20R connected to the TV-Out) in 1024x768 resolution mode:

Here is a close-up:

In spite of a more advanced graphics chip, all the TV-Out settings have remained unchanged.

Selecting the output device:

Selecting the TV format: although GeForce3 supports the SECAM formats, they are unavailable in the driver:

Adjusting the brightness, contrast and flicker filtering: although CX25871 chip allows adjusting the flicker filtering automatically, here it's still done manually:

It feels as though Bt868/869 chips were merely replaced with a newer version of CX25871. The developers didn't have to redesign the drivers, because these chips are backward compatible.

Testing Methods

We decided to compare Leadtek WinFast GeForce3 TD with SUMA PLATINUM GeForce3 based on the same chip.

In Quake3 Arena for 16bit color mode we selected 16bit textures, while for 32bit mode we chose 32bit textures. We also set the highest texture quality and the level of detail, enabled tri-linear filtering and texture compression. All the other settings were left by default. We tested in demo127 from Quake3 Point Release Patch 1.27g.

Performance

Quake3 Arena

As we have expected, Leadtek WinFast GeForce3 TD demonstrates nearly the same performance as SUMA PLATINUM GeForce3 or any other GeForce3 based graphics card. Indeed, how can they be different being equipped with the same GeForce3 chips from NVIDIA, similar memory chips from EliteMT shipped together with GeForce3 chips and being built following the same NVIDIA reference design?

Conclusion

Leadtek WinFast GeForce3 TD is a smart graphics card from a well-known manufacturer. It is a well-done, stylish-looking product, which suffers the only shortcoming: the heatsink ''bars'' are undoubtedly much worse than the regular ribbed heatsinks, since they get tangibly overheated together with the memory chips.

A nice thing to stress is that Leadtek doesn't accompany its graphics cards with useless CDs with outdated games, but encloses them with a complete set of cables and adapters for comfortable work with the onboard TV-Out.

Highs:

• High-quality mounting;
• Splendid 2D image and TV-Out quality;
• Smart package.

Lows:

• Insufficient memory chips cooling.