It seems like a new video card hits the store shelves every quarter. But I always like to say is the price for today's technology worth the performance gain? Sometimes paying for today's technology is superior than sticking with yesterday's outdated products. This is NOT the case with the Winfast GeForce 256 DDR by Leadtek. This video card is definitely a strong performer even though many products are out there that have twice the memory but three times the price.

Before I start my technical review of this product I must say that I am terribly disappointed with Leadtek's Customer Support. Aside from reading anything on the website, that is about what you get. I emailed Leadtek with a few questions about their bios flash release. This was almost a year ago. I am starting to think I won't be getting an answer. Fortunately, the video card is a great one and chances are you won't ever need to contact customer support.

The only reason I bought the Winfast GeForce 256 DDR card (from now on I will refer to it as GeForce) was that I had a Voodoo3 3000 and Quake 3 Arena just got released. I was only able to pull 40 frames (fps) in the game with all the high quality settings turned off and all the "eye candy" turned off. Another reason was the Voodoo cards were not capable of displaying 32 bit color. The nVIDIA chipsets were reported to be able to do this and blow past the Voodoo cards on a pure performance level, as well.

I installed the GeForce in a matter of a few minutes and turned the computer on. I had to install the drivers off the supplied CDRom. Once I did a reboot, I got my Quake 3 Arena going and tweaked all the settings to high quality and turned all the eye candy on. I was amazed. I had never seen the game this way! Stuff glowed, shimmered, shadows loomed in corners and there was no stutter on the screen when I played. I did a test and found the card to be delivering twice the fps than the Voodoo3 3000 and it looked a lot nicer too.

One thing to know about the Leadtek GeForce card is that the company drivers are sub par. The best thing to do is go to www.nvidia.com and download the latest drivers. The nVIDIA reference drivers will increase your performance further and seem to be a lot more stable.

Today I am still playing Quake 3 Arena and using my GeForce card. It has been in two computers and is the last thing I think about upgrading when I feel the need to do an upgrade.

These GeForce cards are a great upgrade to your current system as they handle all the video information and take a lot of load off your CPU. This lets your CPU do other things it needs to do without the chore of handling all the video processing too. I started with a Pentium II 350 and was thinking about buying another CPU as an upgrade. I talked with one of the local computer shop tweakers and he told me for the money, buy a better video card and you will be amazed and the performance gain you get throughout the entire system. He was exactly right. My computer stopped having errors with video intensive applications and the performance of my video games increased tremendously. Today I have a Pentium III 500 and can play Quake 3 Arena with 130 to 140 fps. I would never have been able to do that with my Voodoo3 3000.

So, if you are still running a very outdated 12 megabyte or less video card, have an AGP slot on your motherboard, are low on cash and want to upgrade your system, I would totally recommend this video card.

This GeForce card is solid, I have not had one problem with it since the day I installed it. It is a very good card; even by today's standards.

Recommended: Yes

Amount Paid (US$): 120.00