Hot speed
Written: Feb 06 '01
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Fast, still well supported
Cons: Noisy, some cards are faster still
The Bottom Line: If I had to buy it, I would - but free is nice :)
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| yhwman's Full Review: Creative Labs 3D Blaster Annihilator |
I was given one of these, yup – given! It replaced a (fully working) TNT2 Ultra that was incompatible with my motherboard (I got a new motherboard as well, this was just compensation) and I’m very pleased with it. In 3D games my PIII-450 is faster than my friends PIII-600 with a TNT2 in it. Bizarrely the Geforce has already by superseded by the Geforce2 GTS. Nvidia may have a policy of releasing new hardware every six months, but no game has really taken advantage of the Geforces potential yet, apart from it’s raw speed. It’s like driving a Ferrari flat out in 2nd gear all the time. The Geforce has what Nvidia like to call a GPU, this is capable of doing virtually all the graphics processing, as opposed to the standard way of doing it, where the graphics card draws and the CPU processes. Naturally this, when used, speeds things up dramatically. I do have two criticisms of the card though. 1: It runs very hot and so needs a loud fan and I mean LOUD, though that may just be the Creative Labs card I have. 2: It doesn’t always come out of standby mode. But I can live with that, though I would like to make it quiet!
Update – A year with the card.
Well, that noisy fan got noisier and noisier and noisier until I took action and sprayed some oil on the offending part (See www.geforcefaq.com for more) and it seems very quiet now, though I’m sure that’s just to do with it being unusually loud for a few months.
One thing that has really impressed me about the card is Nvidia’s support for it. New drivers appear on quite a regular basis and on the last major revision (Detonator 3) my frame rates in Quake 3 Arena went up about 15%! Not bad for a year old graphics card eh? I mean, one year – that’s at least 70 in human years isn’t it?
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
yhwman
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Location: UK
Reviews written: 39
Trusted by: 2 members
About Me:
Computer student whose mad for music and motors.
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