NVIDIA GeForce SDR Roundup (February 00)

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The Leadtek WinFast GeForce 256 SDR card was one of the very first GeForce cards to hit the market. Using stock reference design, Leadtek choose to use 5.0 ns EliteMT SDRAM chips, which provides additional overclocking potential over the other reference designed cards that use 5.5 ns SDRAM chips. TV-out is provided via the common Brooktree 869 chip and an onboard S-Video port. What Leadtek gains by using fast 5.0 ns SDRAM chips, it looses with its poor cooling method. The heatsink/fan combo comes attached to the GPU with what appeared to be scarcely applied thermal glue and pressure pins on the side of the fan. Upon removing these pins, the heatsink/fan combo quickly fell off the card. While this should prove to be sufficient cooling for everyday use, overclocking potential is brought down significantly due to the heat that gets trapped between the heatsink and the GPU.

Leadtek chose to use NVIDIA's reference drives with a few cosmetic twists. Once again, this provides for speedy and frequent driver updates but also takes away from functionality of the card. Also included is Speed Runner, Leadtek's overclocking utility, which provides an easy way to tweak core and memory speeds. Finally, there is Leadtek's Eye Protection utility which reminds you to take a break from looking at your monitor too long. Useless in home situations, perhaps this could be used at work as an excuse to take a coffee break.

Pros: Very fast 5 ns SDRAM chips, TV-out support, overclocking utility.

Cons: Poor cooling, reference design.