X-bit labs

Leadtek WinFast A400 Ultra TDH Graphics Card Review

Category: Video

by Alexey Stepin

[ 09/01/2004 | 12:47 PM ]

We decided to take a look at one of the most powerful graphics card around, Leadtek GeForce 6800 Ultra. Being equipped with monumental cooling system, this product provides ultimate reliability and stability even with overclocking, deserving to be called the fastest Doom III graphics option ever tested by X-bit labs.

Table of contents:

• Accessories
  
• Leadtek WinFast A400 Ultra TDH – Bigger, Heavier, Cooler!
  
• Noise, Overclocking and 2D Quality
  
• Testbed and Methods
  
• Performance in First Person 3D Shooters
  
• Doom III
  
• Call of Duty
  
• Unreal Tournament 2004
  
• Far Cry
  
• Halo: Combat Evolved
  
• Painkiller
  
• FireStarter
  
• Highly Anticipated DirectX 9 Game 1
  
• Highly Anticipated DirectX 9 Game 2
  
• Performance in Third Person 3D Shooters
  
• Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic
  
• Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow
  
• Prince of Persia: Sands of Time
  
• Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne
  
• Performance in Simulators
  
• IL-2 Sturmovik: Aces in the Sky
  
• Lock On: Modern Air Combat
  
• Colin McRae Rally 04
  
• Performance in Strategy Games
  
• Perimeter
  
• Performance in Semi-Synthetic Benchmarks
  
• Aquamark3
  
• Performance in Synthetic Benchmarks
  
• Futuremark 3DMark03 build 340
  
• Conclusion
  

A host of products from Leadtek Research has gone through our test lab, always getting our praises for the quality of manufacture, high performance and rich accessories. Leadtek’s graphics cards are distinguished for their original and effective cooling systems that could keep the card up and going under the harshest conditions.

Leadtek of course welcomed the new GeForce 6800 processor family from NVIDIA by releasing a series of solutions based around these chips. The company didn’t change its well-recognized brand and the new series comes to market under the name of WinFast A400. We are going to talk about the top-end member of this family today, the Leadtek WinFast A400 Ultra TDH graphics card.

We already informed you in our news reports that NVIDIA officially refuted the rumors about the allegedly upcoming GeForce 6800 Ultra Extreme graphics processor, working at higher frequencies, saying they would not ship such a product. However, a few selected partners will offer accelerated versions of the GeForce 6800 Ultra.

Leadtek is amongst them, and its overclocked GeForce 6800 Ultra found its way into our test lab. Let’s take a closer look at it.

Accessories

Like its predecessors, the WinFast A400 Ultra comes in a beautiful box, with all the necessary cabling and software.

The design of the box remained practically the same, save for the yellow upper right corner with the GeForce 6800 Ultra logotype and the proud words “Authorized Solution Provider”. The picture in the central part of the box still displays some kind of a mage. Unlike the personage on the package of the WinFast A380 Ultra TDH, this one looks somewhat more aggressive, as if implying the power of the graphics card inside. Overall, the package looks nice enough, without any excessive gaudiness.

The box contains all the necessary manuals and the following cables and adapters:

• Two DVI-I à D-Sub adapters;
• Two Molex-type power splitters;
• S-Video-to-RCA adapter;
• S-Video cable;
• RCA cable.

Besides that, you receive the following software:

• CD with drivers and utilities;
• CD with Gun Metal;
• CD with Big Mutha Truckers;
• 2 CDs with Prince of Persia: Sands of Time;
• DVD with Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow.

There are two modern games in the bundle, and one of them comes on a DVD! That’s an obvious advantage of the WinFast A400 Ultra TDH in the eyes of a hardcore gamer. Besides the drivers, the compact disc with system software contains the following utilities:

• WinFast DVD player;
• WinFox II hardware monitoring utility;
• Cult 3D utility for publishing 3D content on the Web;
• Color correction software: Coloreal Embedded, Visual and Bright.

We described the multi-functional hardware monitoring system WinFox in our Leadtek WinFast A350 TDH VIVO review (see our article called Dependence of Contemporary High-End Graphics Accelerators Performance on FSAA Mode: VisionTek Xtasy 9800 PRO and Leadtek WinFast A350 TDH Graphics Cards Review for more details), so we won’t repeat ourselves again, but will rather move on right to the graphics card.