Introduction
Introduction
When the Geforce 2 GTS debuted just over a year ago, it was THE performance card to own. Video cards from the more reputable manufacturers such as Hercules, Elsa, and Creative, cost upwards of £250 ($400) on release, leaving the GTS only within the grasp of the elite gamer. Things have now changed, and compared to likes of the Kyro II (review here) and the Radeon LE (Review here), the GTS was looking like much less of an attractive deal to performance conscious buyers - until now.
A friend of mine was looking to upgrade his PC, whilst spending the least amount of money. Since he was using an aging TNT2, the graphics card was a top priority. Instantly my first recommendation was a Kyro II based card, which offer very good performance in non-T&L titles, whilst costing a lot less money. However, when browsing through an online retailer, I came across a Geforce 2 GTS for an amazing £79 (about $115). Since this is cheaper than many MX cards (nVIDIA's budget version of the GTS) I instantly ordered the card.
When the package arrived, it came with no fancy box, no labelled stickers and definitely no bundled software (except for a driver CD). This is however par for the course for an OEM card, and I was expecting no more. It's the card itself that counts, and believe me for the price, this little green PCB doesn't disappoint!
The Test Setup
For this review I decided to revert to my old faithful PIII 1GHz system, since it works with anything, and still cuts the mustard in the performance stakes.
- Intel PIII 1GHz Processor
- Tekcase Galileo
- 256MB Cas 2 PC133 RAM
- IBM Deskstar 75GXP 30.2GB
- ASUS P2B Motherboard - BX's are STILL the fastest :)
- 19" Sony Multiscan GDM-400PS Monitor
- Fresh Install of Win98
Videocards compared were the Geforce 2 MX, the ATi Radeon 64DDR, the Voodoo 5 5500 and the Elsa Gladiac 920 Geforce 3.
The tests
This is only a quick review, (since the GTS has been reviewed to death) so I have limited the resolution to 1024x768, and the test suite to the following benchmarks:
- Quake III Arena Timedemo 001
- Madonion 3D Mark 2000
- Madonion 3D Mark 2001
- Vulpine GLmark V1.17
The Drivers
For all of the nVIDIA cards i used the new 21.81 XP detonators drivers. For the Radeon I used driver revision 7075, and for the Voodoo, driver revision 1.04.
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