by FastSite
02/19/2000 | 12:00 AM
A good position never remains vacant for long. This is the best saying to characterize the situation themanufacturers of graphics accelerators on NVIDIA chipsets are currently in. Some manufacturers quit, and newones enter into their positions. As you probably remember, NVIDIA has recently lost 3 manufacturers of graphicscards based on NVIDIA chipsets. After the deal with STB and Diamond companies (the first was bought by 3dfx andthe second - by S3), both of them started building up real competition with NVIDIA products, which threatened tobecome cut-throat. Hercules Company in its turn simply went bankrupt. However, the masters with a good recordceded their niches in the market to younger newcomers, mostly chosen from the Taiwanese mainboard manufacturers.<%BANNER[article]%>
Among the freshers in graphics cards manufacturing, we noticed ABIT famous for its extraordinary mainboardswith unique overclocking potential. If we don't take into account a really small number of graphics cards oni740 chip, which Intel were sold together with i440BX, then we will have every right to consider this move the firstsignificant experience of the legendary mainboard manufacturer. The first graphics cards launched by ABIT will bethe following: SILURO GT2 Ultra, SILURO GT2V, SILURO GT2 and SILURO GF256 on NVIDIA TNT2 Ultra, TNT2 Pro, TNT2 andGeForce 256 correspondingly. Everybody was very anxious to see these graphics cards, because they promised to besomething cool: ABIT had never produced any ordinary products :-) . The most widely spread opinion claimed thatthey would be just perfect for overclocking. Well, let's find out the truth. This review is going to be devoted toABIT SILURO GT2 Ultra graphics card we had for testing. However, we believe that quite a lot from what we are goingto say in this respect can also refer to other graphics cards of SILURO GT2 family built on different modificationsof NVIDIA Riva TNT2.
Here is the list of ABIT SILURO GT2 Ultra main features:
We would like to say a few words about the package. The graphics card is supplied in a colorful box with a shockingpicture of human eyes completely popped out of their sockets and looking crazily at each other (if ABIT manufacturedsound cards as well, they would be sold in colorful boxes decorated with torn off ears :-) The box proudly carries aninscription: "More than US$150 worth of Software bundled", which arouses public curiosity and attracts everybody'sattention. Inside you can really find two games - Accolade Test Drive 5 and Monolith Shogo. Unfortunately, thesegames are already over one year old (a bit outdated, eh?), however, you shouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth.Besides that, the card is also accompanied by a WinDVD ver. 1.3.5 DVD-player dating back to November 1999.
Then the box also contains a user's manual designed according to ABIT's traditional style, which makes itpossible even for an absolute novice to find his way in the drivers and in the card's features.
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ABIT SILURO GT2 Ultra looks like an ordinary card on NVIDIA Riva TNT2 Ultra chip constructed according to thereference design. The card supports AGP 4x mode and is equipped with 32MB SDRAM located in 16 16Mbit microchips.ABIT decided on 5ns microchips from ESMT. As a rule, the manufacturers of TNT2 Ultra graphics cards usually use 5.5nsmemory. ABIT, however, suggested using 5ns memory, as providing higher overclockability of the card.
Strange as it might seem but ABIT card worked absolutely impeccably at the standard frequencies of NVIDIA Riva TNT2Ultra. The chipset supported 150MHz and the memory - 183MHz. The cooling of the chipset was arranged with an active coolerby AAVID, which was very much like the coolers fastened on Matrox G400 MAX. Judging by our personal experience we can saythat this cooler provides quite good chipset cooling and together with the memory, which boasts quick access, they shouldguarantee high overclocking results for ABIT SILURO GT2 Ultra.
The graphics card is also provided with a digital connector for LCD-monitors and S-Video out. The first one allowsconnecting LCD-panels with digital interface supporting up to 1280x1024. TV output of SILURO GT2 Ultra supports 640x480in NTSC mode and 800x600 in PAL mode. The graphics card of course has all the required microchips, which realize thementioned functions - PAL/NTSC and TMDS encoders. So, SILURO GT2 Ultra has all the possible connectors with the onlyexception of Composite TV-output. Another indisputable advantage of SILURO GT2 Ultra is a three-meter long S-Videocable, which goes together with the package.
The drivers set supplied together with ABIT SILURO GT2 Ultra is now based on NVIDIA reference drivers ver. 3.65 andcan't boast anything specific and worthy. In fact, now we can't predict how often ABIT will post new driver versions onits web site, since it's ABIT first experience in the field of graphics. However, keeping in mind the frequency of regularmainboards BIOS updates and the fact that the software supplied together with the graphics card includes BIOS Flash ROMprogramming utility, we can hope that ABIT won't ever forget to update the drivers. The screenshots below show some of thesettings provided by these drivers:
Having installed the drivers, we noticed a new icon in the system tray, which loads the pop-up menu. There you canquickly shift between different resolutions and refresh rate settings.
The graphics card is supplied together with the drivers for ABIT SILURO GT2 Ultra for Windows NT 4. They are noneother but standard NVIDIA drivers and hence they don't include any useful utilities such as gamma correction, forinstance.
Overclockers from all over the world are already used to receiving the best and the most modern tools to overclockthe system components. And what have we got in our case? Well, unfortunately, ABIT appeared able to provide us onlywith a huge disappointment: it as an absolutely ordinary utility with a loud name Graphic Max:
With the help of Graphic Max we can change the chipset working frequency in the interval from 135MHz to 190MHz andmemory working frequency in the interval from 160MHz to 230MHz with 1MHz step.
And now it's high time we all looked at the performance of the overclocked ABIT SILURO GT2 Ultra. One by one weincreased the memory and chipset working frequency in order to find the optimum for overclocking. All the results aregiven in the table below:
| Memory Clock Frequency, MHz | Core Clock Frequency, MHz | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 150 | 155 | 160 | 165 | 170 | 175 | 180 | |
| 183 | Passed | Passed | Passed | Passed | Passed | Passed | Failed |
| 190 | Passed | Passed | Passed | Passed | Passed | Passed | Failed |
| 195 | Passed | Passed | Passed | Passed | Passed | Passed | Failed |
| 200 | Passed | Passed | Passed | Passed | Passed | Passed | Failed |
| 205 | Passed | Passed | Passed | Passed | Passed | Passed | Failed |
| 210 | Passed | Passed | Passed | Passed | Passed | Failed | Failed |
| 215 | Passed | Passed | Passed | Passed | Passed | Failed | Failed |
| 220 | Passed | Failed | Failed | Failed | Failed | Failed | Failed |
| 225 | Failed | Failed | Failed | Failed | Failed | Failed | Failed |
And again ABIT failed to be up to our expectations. Despite fast memory and good cooling, the maximum we managed toachieve when overclocking was only 170/215MHz, which was actually quite far from the values we had got with other graphicscards based on TNT2 Ultra (you may have a look at our article devoted to this matter). Moreover,although the chipset frequency gets almost to its top - 180-190MHz, the same memory on Creative 3D Blaster Riva TNT2 Ultra works at240-250MHz without any problems.
Another important thing about overclocking deals with higher AGP frequency. Will our graphics card be able towork in this AGP mode? This matter has become more acute recently namely due to the launching of new CPUs intendedfor 133MHz FSB. The thing is that if the system bus frequency gets higher (over 100MHz), all i440BX based mainboardswill send more than the required 66MHz to the AGP bus. For example, if you set 133MHz FSB for i440BX based mainboard,the AGP will get 89MHz. According to the tests carried out in a system with i440BX based mainboard it turned out thatABIT SILURO GT2 Ultra, unlike Creative 3D Blaster Riva TNT2 Ultra, cannot work in such conditions at all. As soon asthe system bus is set to 124MHz (AGP receives 83MHz), SILURO GT2 Ultra starts working properly.
We have already touched upon the performance of graphics cards based on NVIDIA Riva TNT2 Ultra several times.If you are looking for more details, you may check our Creative 3D Blaster Riva TNT2 Ultra Review. That is why wewon't dwell on the performance of ABIT SILURO GT2 Ultra: it hardly differs from that shown by similar cards fromCreative or Diamond.
However, we have to admit that image quality in 2D is quite high. At higher resolutions up to 1600x1200 we weresurprised to see impressively clear-cut images, which seemed to be the best among all the other graphics cards onRiva TNT2 Ultra chipset.
As for the performance of ABIT SILURO GT2 Ultra, we would like to draw your attention to the testing resultsachieved in Quake3 Arena and Expendable in default mode and overclocked up to 170/215MHz.
The testing system was configured as follows:
Well, yes, it's far from GeForce, really. It's just an ordinary TNT2 Ultra. Nevertheless, this graphics card proved quiteacceptable for gaming at 1024x768 in 32bit color.
So, despite all the forecasts ABIT SILURO GT2 Ultra didn't turn out anything special. An ordinary graphicscard based on NVIDIA Riva TNT2 Ultra with average overclocking potential and the impossibility to work at 89MHz sent toAGP bus. However, the software included into the package as well as LCD-monitors support easily make up for all thesedrawbacks.