by Anna Filatova
01/13/2001 | 02:31 PM
You know, Chinese manufacturers deserve a monument somewhere. Or if not a monument, then at least a memorial board :-) because not a single manufacturer dared not to follow NVIDIA’s recommendations concerning the configuration of the cards based on NVIDIA graphics chips. And what about the Chinese graphics card makers? – No problem! This Chinese hardware shop is now selling graphics cards, which do not resemble a single item from what NVIDIA claimed. Just take a look at the card specs: GeForce2 GTS 200MHz; 32 MB 5.5ns SDR SDRAM 190MHz. This product really deserves being called the "Mutant of the Year". And which is especially interesting, it’s the possibility to change the chip ID fromGeForce2 GTS to Quadro2 Pro, without resoldering the Bridges, as tnaw_xtennis did. As a result, we get Quadro2 Pro with 32MB 190MHz SDR SDRAM.
At first we didn’t believe that there is a real card like that, since GeForce2 GTS doesn’t support SDR SDRAM according to the official specs. However, our friends from Reactor Critical contacted the manufacturers and received the following comments:
UNIKA will launch a geforce2 Pro chip based video card called Fast Fit 7000 AGP soon in next week. What are the unique features of this card? Well, first it will be equipped with 32MB 5.5ns 190MHz SDRAM, not the DDR SDRAM we commonly see on all other Geforce2 Pro video card. The core speed is 200MHz!Frankly speaking, we do not quite understand, how the company positions this graphics card: in fact it is a GeForce2 MX with 4 rendering pipelines and hence with higher fillrate. However, judging by cost of this product, which is around $120, it will be positioned just like the GeForce2 MX is.
The second thing is that UNIKA will set a jumper on the card PCB, it will let users to choose between GTS PRO mode and Quadro2 Pro mode , But UNIKA will not provide Quadro2 Pro driver and Bios to its users. UNIKA called this feature is "Quadro2 pro optional" and printed "Quadro2 pro optional" on the box surface of Fast Fit 7000 AGP video card.