Hidden Powers
Written: Sep 12 '05 (Updated Sep 13 '05)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Affordable sub-top perfomer with hidden powers. Drastic copper cooling solution retained by Leadtek.
Cons: Still not really all that cheap, physically heavy, needs a hefty power supply
The Bottom Line: If you don't want to spend the money for a top of the range card but are looking to buy a performance card, this might be an excellent choice indeed.
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| isvikthere's Full Review: Leadtek WinFast A400 TDH GeForce 6800 STD, (128 MB... |
INTRODUCTION
Is he really reviewing yet another videocard, I hear you ask yourselves? Well, erm, yes since my previous videocard received such great accolades (ahum) here on Epinions I felt compelled to write yet another one.
For a while I was looking for a replacement card for my Geforce Ti4200 which is way over three years old now and although still quite capable does seem to start to suffer and stutter under the latest of games. Since I try to be a budget conscious gamer there were two options : budget new or secondhand. Remember that not that long a go I bought a Radeon 9800Pro card (reviewed here on Epinions) secondhand. So this time I turned to Ebay to see what fellow hardware enthusiasts had on offer in the gaming videocard department. I was in fact looking for a videocard with the Nvidia Geforce 6600 GT graphics processor. Before the summer of 2005 this card was widely accepted as offering the best buck for the money in the most recent card lineup, offering the best price/performance ratio.
However on Ebay, undoubtedly due to its popularity, this type of cards is auctioned at ridiculous prices, almost as much as the price for new. So no way was I going to pay that much for a secondhand product with uncertain warranty and no bulletproof money back guarantee from private sellers that might be very remote and/or not trustworthy.
So I decided to go for new but alas, my favourite on-line vendor had no generic (and therefore affordable) 6600GT in stock this summer and there was a certain urgency. So back to Ebay it was, but this time for one of the on-line stores you find there, that in fact have nothing to do with the bidding game and simply sell things at fixed prices, does Buy Now! ring a bell?
So there I noticed this Leadtek card for a very attractive price indeed ; as the numbering suggests the 6800 chip is supposed to have superior features compared to the 6600 I was initially lusting for. [irony]And with the heaps of money I make writing these reviews here I owe it to Epinions to buy a shiny new product, so I can review it, make more money, buy a new product, etc.[/irony]. Anyway, with the new Geforce 7800 chip out prices for this line of Geforce 6800 cards have plummeted this summer, assuring that they came into the reach of this budget conscious occasional gamer.
THE LEADTEK A400 TDH
The Ebay vendor offered two similar cards for a price that was just a tad over the price my on-line vendor would be asking for the no-brand 6600 GT if ever he had one. One card was from MSI and then there was the WinFast from Leadtek. Since I am over the moon with my Leadtek TV capture card (reviewed here on Epinions) I thought it safer to opt for the Leadtek model, although the MSI comes in a huge carton box (even bigger than the ones for motherboards) and with tonnes of software. The Leadtek on the other hand comes in a more modest form with a regular videocard box (still too big for its contents, but ...) with some Merlin type wizzard on the side but with full versions of both 'Splinter Cell - Pandora Tomorrow' and 'Prince of Persia - Sands of Time', two games that I am very keen on discovering. Since I am not convinced of the 'bigger is better' theory I stuck with 'Small is beautiful' and went for the Leadtek card.
The card, presented by Nvidia in the Spring of 2004, was first on sale somewhere around September 2004, so now exactly one year ago, it seems that Leadtek uses the same package (carton and games) for most of their current offerings. Also the layout of the card with heatsink and cooler is much more plain on the Leadtek than on the MSI which seemed a bit too screamish to me with a blue LED light on the cooler and such. But Leadtek has a very good reputation (which I can acknowledge) and apparently their graphic cards are built with a very high tolerance margin.
But just like you I am very confused by the way manufacturers identify their products. The full name
of the card I am reviewing today is the WinFast A400 TDH. Now what is all that ? The first part is simple enough : all current Leadtek graphic cards are called WinFast, then there is the A400. This A400 is used for all Leadtek cards equipped with the Nvidia Geforce FX 6800 chip in its different flavours. The chipset on the 6800 cards had the Nvidia Codename NV40 so Leadtek just added a zero to that to come up with the 400. The 6800 is currently Nvidia's second fasted graphics chip. It was the fastest up and
until Nvidia brought out the 7800 chip over two months ago. Now what the TDH stands for I honestly do not know, and apparently no one else has ever wondered.
So my card comes with just the basic version of Nvidia's 6800 chip which also exists in an inferior 6800 LE(LightEdition), and the superior 6800 GT and 6800 ULTRA forms. These cards, all equipped with the same 6800 graphics processor distinguish themselves through either core speed (speed of the graphic processor chip), memory speed or the number of pixel pipelines present and activated. Which of course brings us to the
TECHNICAL SPECIFICATIONS :
- 64 bit Texture Filtering & Blending
- the chip is built on 0.13 Micron Process Technology
- 256 bit Memory Interface with Advanced Memory Control
- Integrated TV Encoder
- Supports DirectX 9, DirectX 9.0c
- Shader Model 3.0
- Open GL 1.5
- Superscalar 12-Pipe GPU Architecture,
so only twelve activated on this basic 6800 and a meagre 8 on the 6800LE, the Geforce 6800 GT and ULTRA have the full 16 pipelines enabled by default
- supports AGP 8X
- 128 MB DDR RAM onboard
- Dual 400MHz RAMDACs : these are the units that pilot the 2D engines for two monitors
For more technical information please click the appropriate "View Details" button here in Epinions or visit the Leadteksite.
I am sure that all this techstuff will run off on some of you like water off a duck's back but how do you expect to make a distinction between graphics cards if the only way to distinguish them lies in the these exact technical specifications ? In fact both manufacturers Nvidia and Ati try to take advantage of this type of confusion or even aversion by selling products that sound similar, and come in similar packaging, but have very different performance levels.
INSTALLATION
Anyway I proceeded to install the card in my system which basically still is this :
Asus P4-S533 motherboard, now with Asus i-Panel attached ! ;-)
Pentium IV Northwood 1.8 processor running @ 2,453 Ghz
2 X 512Mb Twinmoss PC2700 DDR-memory
Tybotech 300W Power Supply Unit (PSU)
Windows XP Professional with SP1
In fact the installation is no brainbreaker, stick the card in the AGP-slot, screw it down at the rear, plug in the cable splitter in one of the connectors coming out of your PSU, plug the power connector into the card and you're in business. Just make sure to uninstall your previous card under Windows before installing this one. Also make sure that your PSU has at least 300 Watts capacity.
Here I have to note that the card is very heavy so do install and fix it securely. If ever you are into LAN-gaming and often transport your computer the added weight can be a handicap. The extra weight comes purely from the cooling solution Leadtek opted for here. It consists of an all copper heatsink, covering both the graphics chip and the memory chips with a huge fan on top of it. Even the rear of the card has a huge copper heatsink attached to it.
Leadtek refers to this cooling solution as a "3 Air-Surround Cooling System". The card itself is enormous in length compared to the Geforce Ti4200 I own and bigger still than the not so small 9800pro I also reviewed. However it stills only takes up one slot (the so-called 1-Slot Form Factor) and thus leaves the first PCI slot underneath the AGP slot free. However to aid cooling it is advised to not use this PCI slot if you don't really need it.
Because of its size the fan doens't have to run at jet turbine speeds so all in all the noise level produced by tha card is still within reason. I will still be audible though in a super silenced computer, so those people maybe will have to look for a passive cooling solution for this card.
As both Ati and Nvidia now work with unified drivers, you are advised to go to Nvidia's site and donwload the latest ForceWare driver version. I have it running now with the Forceware driver in its verion 77.77 for Windows 2000/XP.
Great about these latest drivers is that for the 6800 chip there is now temperature monitoring enabled. In my system for desktop applications the dial shows 47°C, which seems very reasonable to me. Strangely enough for the 6000 GT cards you have to do an update of the card's Bios to enable the temperature monitoring. With the 6800 this is standard.
THE PACKAGE
In the carton I found :
- the Geforce 6800 videocard (Leadtek model A400 TDH)
- Quick Installation Guide
- Driver and Utilities CD-ROM
- General Guide
- splitter cable for the powerfeed to the card
- AV Cable
- S-Video Cable
- DVI to VGA convertor (to allow you to plug two CRT monitors in the card)
And the following two games :
- Splinter Cell : Pandora Tomorrow (DVD-version)
- Prnce of Persia : Warrior Within (DVD-version) and not "the Sands of time" I was expecting to find !
SURPRISE !
My mother always told me to keep the best for last, so :
Now why did I pay a tad (roughly 10%) over the lowest price I could find on the net (150 US$) ? This because the vendor guaranteed that this Leadtek card which in its basic 6800 version is only supposed to have 12 pixel pipelines activated, by using a software tool called "Rivatuner" could be brought up to the 16 active pixel piplenes of the Geforce 6800 Ultra version. Giving the performance of this not so basic graphics card yet another boost.
And did it work ? You bet your life it did ! The vendor was even kind enough to include the Rivatuner tool on a CD in the package and even a small guide on what to do in the program to activate the full 16 pipelines. I never used the version installed on the CD because in the meantime I had already downloaded and installed RivaTuner v.2.0 Release Candidate 15.6 from the guru3D.com website.
With the instruction pages activating the four pipelines was childsplay, although the RivaTuner is a complex and powerful tool. I even ventured to try and resuscite the disabled fifth vertex shader pipeline but this didn't work for me, it just gave me artefacts on the screen so I quickly disabled it again. It seems that for some people this was possible though, so they could boost peformance from this basic Geforce 6800 card even further.
Nevertheless this is what the 3Dmark benchmarks showed me, all tests performed on the same above mentionned system. Please note that there are two entries for the Leadtek WinFast A400 TDH, once with the standard 12 pixel pipelines and once after RivaTuner reactivated the four remaining pixel pipelines which are normally disabled :
3DMark 2001 SE (DirectX 8)
Ati Radeon 9800 Pro : 13034
Winfast A400 TDH @ 12 : 13090
Winfast A400 TDH @ 16 : 13092
3DMark 2003
Ati Radeon 9800 Pro : 4915
Winfast A400 TDH @ 12 : 8260
Winfast A400 TDH @ 16 : 8882
3DMark 2005 version 1.2.0
Ati Radeon 9800 Pro : 1971
Winfast A400 TDH @ 12 : 3161
Winfast A400 TDH @ 16 : 3381
Of course benchmarks like 3Dmark are just synthetic tests but they do give a good indication of what a graphics card is capable of, making good use of all current technology for graphics rendering.
CONCLUSION
If ever there is one sector where it pays to be able to wait it is computer hardware. I bought this card at half the price it was sold aaround Christmas 2004, less than one year ago. In the meantime the drivers went through some serious updates and the RivaTuner experts had the time to figure out how to revive the disabled four pixel pipelines.
Well done Leadtek and my thanks to the guys from RivaTuner, especially Alexey Nicolaychuk, RivaTuner programmer and Designer !
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 165
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Epinions.com ID:
isvikthere
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Reviews written: 46
Trusted by: 14 members
About Me:
Amongst other things, a computer hardware enthusiast who writes only about things I know/own.
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