by Anna Filatova
12/20/2001 | 06:37 PM
Gainward seems to have remembered suddenly that since the times of Voodoo5 6000 no one had ever offered any 3D graphics accelerators with over 64MB of onboard graphics memory. So, the company decided to make up for the lost time and today they announced the launching of the first mass gaming graphics card with a 128MB frame buffer. This card is called Gainward GeForce3 PowerPack!!! Ti/500 "JUMBO" "Golden Sample", although it is built not on geForce3 Ti 500 graphics chip, as you may have thought, but on a slower GeForce3 Ti 200. The card will be equipped with 4ns memory chips and will have a TV-Out and Video-In (composite and S-Video).
Gainward GeForce3 PowerPack!!! Ti/500 "JUMBO" "Golden Sample" graphics card is expected to start selling in January 2002 and should cost around $270. We have to stress that due to twice as much graphics memory used, than on the regular GeForce3 Ti 200 graphics cards, GeForce3 PowerPack!!! Ti/500 "JUMBO" "Golden Sample" will be more expensive: the price of this newcomer is very close to that of the regular 64MB solutions on GeForce3 Ti 500. Bearing in mind this state of things, it is quite doubtful that Gainward GeForce3 PowerPack!!! Ti/500 "JUMBO" "Golden Sample" will manage to become very popular, as 64MB of graphics memory are now more than enough for most games.
However, Gainward GeForce3 PowerPack!!! Ti/500 "JUMBO" "Golden Sample" boasts one more advantage: Enhanced Mode. With a special jumper on the PCB used to activate this Enhanced Mode the working frequency of the card can be increased by about 25% over the standard 175MHz core and 400MHz memory frequencies. This way, its performance in this mode will come close to that of GeForce3 Ti 500. And as for the stability issue, Gainward promises that it will not be a problem even when the card will be overclocked like that, as they tend to use high quality memory chips, provide good cooling solution and introduce their own unique PCB design.