A few weeks ago, the first TNT2 boards were just being released and Leadtek was there with the first boards. Leadtek is a relatively unknown manufacturer, especially in the retail market, but having the first TNT2 really helped put them on the map. Now everyone is wondering about this card. Will it still be as popular when other TNT2 solutions start popping up? Well, let's take a look.

Available with 16MB SDRAM or 32MB SGRAM, all S320 II models include TV-out. Models with the "Pro" suffix attached to the name include the optional DDWG (Digital Display Working Group) compliant Digital LCD Flat Panel output interface that supports resolutions up to 1280x1024. AnandTech's review unit was not a Pro model. While the first parts are not surprisingly non-"ultra" parts, Leadtek has done some work to make their regular TNT2 a bit more appealing.

Feature Overview

Taken from www.leadtek.com:

  Configurations Available

The Card

Click to enlarge

The Winfast 3D S320 II is available in four unique configurations, the differentiating qualities among them being memory size and the presence of a digital LCD out port. The card AnandTech will be taking a look at in this review is the Winfast 3D S320 II-32, a TNT2 based part outfitted with 32MB of SGRAM, but not the digital LCD out port.

The card is based closely upon NVIDIA's reference TNT2 design with a few modifications, such as the addition of a toroidial inductor and two big (for a video card) capacitors at the edge of the first SGRAM chip designed to maintain the strength of the electrical current as well as limit the amount of "noise" present in the signal. Other than that particular addition, which shifted the components on the S320-II around a bit, the card is based closely upon NVIDIA's reference design and should therefore be very similar to the majority of SGRAM cards out there.

The memory configuration on AnandTech's sample, as discussed earlier, was a 32MB setup which was composed of four 4MB Samsung 7ns SGRAM chips on each side of the board. The default memory clock was set at 150MHz, although AnandTech's sample was capable of running the memory at 170MHz. After a few discussions with competing TNT2 manufacturers, it seems like some of the most popular SDRAM suppliers for TNT2 boards will be Samsung, Micron, and a not so well known manufacturer, MIRA. While AnandTech's board, equipped with Samsung chips made it up to 170MHz, the same may not be true for boards outfitted with non-Samsung modules.

Basically, when it comes to video cards, the manufacturer usually opts for the best deal they can get on memory in large quantities, so if one day Samsung SGRAM grows to be a little more expensive, don't be surprised if board manufacturers turn to other sources for solutions. The only requirement, remember, is to make sure that the memory runs fine at the speed the manufacturer spec'd the board at, and for Leadtek, 150MHz isn't a feat too difficult to achieve.

The Winfast S320 II that is currently available is not an "ultra" TNT2 part, but rather just the plain vanilla TNT2 that NVIDIA recommends clocking at 125MHz core and 150MHz memory. Leadtek is planning to produce an ultra based board that will be available toward the end of May or early June. No word on that clock rate as of now. The regular TNT2 core on the S320 II is clocked at a safe 140MHz setting by default, which is high enough to provide a noticeable improvement over competing 125MHz solutions as well as older TNT and Voodoo2 cards, while low enough to insure proper operation and stability. The majority of competitors TNT2 boards will follow NVIDIA's recommendations and some will include an overclocking slider for your own experimentation.

The 0.25-micron wafers the TNT2 is cut from provide for relatively cool operation, much cooler than the older TNTs and even the new Voodoo3s. They run at a point where a simple passive heatsink would provide adequate cooling for the chip at 140MHz, however it's not surprising that Leadtek went a step further and equipped all members of the S320 II line with a low profile heatsink/fan combo. The fan operates quietly, does not interfere with adjacent cards, and performs a decent job of keeping the TNT2 cool, much better than a heatsink alone. The fansink is attached to the surface of the TNT2 using thermally conductive tape, but for the best cooling performance you may want to replace the tape with a generous amount of thermal grease - the same kind used on CPU heatsinks will do just fine. Using thermal grease (aka heatsink compound) is not a requirement, but for all of you tweakers and overclockers out there it may be something to check out.

The TNT2's integrated 300MHz RAMDAC drives the analog VGA connector on the board that is accompanied by a digital LCD out port on the Pro model as well as standard S-video/RCA out on all models. The S-video/RCA out is achieved using a small connector that runs from the back of the card and provides separate S-video and RCA jacks for connecting to a TV. The 2D image quality of the Leadtek board wasn't bad at all at resolutions up to 1280 x 1024. Upon hitting 1600 x 1200 there was a slight, albeit noticeable, degradation of the 2D image (depending on how sensitive your eyes are), and each step above 1600 x 1200 also exhibited a similar drop off in quality.

The quality of the 300MHz RAMDAC only accounts for half of the 2D image quality equation, the other half coming from the design of the board itself and the quality of the filters between the TNT2/memory and the VGA output. Since the S320 II is essentially a copy of NVIDIA's reference design, the 2D image quality can be considered average for a TNT2 card. Unfortunately, you probably won't ever see what "above average" for a TNT2 card will hold, since there are very few manufacturers willing to risk an increase in manufacturing cost for "awesome 2D image quality," especially not in a world where the term 3D alone sells.

The hardware installation portion of the S320 II's setup process is the same as it would be for any graphics card. Unfortunately the beginner or novice user will remain relatively unaided by any helpful diagrams as the User's Manual (like most video card manuals) provides very little in terms of installation help. If you can't install your own video card however, then you may want to rethink plunging into a buying decision such as a brand new TNT2 card.

The software portion of the installation did not provide AnandTech with any problems either - just drop in the CD and everything is more or less automatic, including the installation of DirectX 6. However the drivers Leadtek is currently shipping do have some issues that need to be addressed. First of all, Super7 compatibility with the drivers was not too promising at all, disabling AGP 2X mode aided in increasing stability however the test system experienced frequent crashes under both OpenGL and Direct3D based games.

The performance of the drivers themselves was quite poor, the bundled drivers dated back to a March release and seemed to be optimized for stability rather than performance. Leadtek will of course make driver updates available from their website occasionally, and the latest NVIDIA drivers will boost performance a bit. If Leadtek never gets around to releasing updated drivers, there is always the option of using NVIDIA reference drivers, but this will probably not be necessary. Our testing used a beta build of the TNT2 drivers from NVIDIA.

A nice feature Leadtek included with the S320 II is an overclocking utility that allows you to set the core frequency and the memory clock of the board in 1MHz increments up to 160MHz core frequency and 180MHz memory clock. Using this utility and no additional cooling, AnandTech was able to overclock a sample S320 II-32 to 160MHz core and 175MHz memory, while remaining fairly stable. A slightly more conservative 150/170MHz core/memory was rock solid. These speeds approach the defaults of ultra TNT2 cards - remember, this is just the standard TNT2. As always, results will vary from card to card when overclocking.

In the event that you are able to exceed the values in the Leadtek utility, an event that is highly unlikely, you'll want to grab the latest version of Powerstrip and configure the frequencies from there. Leadtek also decided not to bother with Microsoft WHQL approval by including check boxes for toggling vsync - so no registry hacks or extra utilities required there. A number of other tweaking options are also included by Leadtek.

Driver Screenshots

The Test

AnandTech received a retail version of Leadtek's WinFast 3D S320 II Riva TNT2 (32MB SGRAM) card. The card was clocked at the default of 140MHz core and 150MHz memory. For a complete set of benchmarks, see AnandTech's comprehensive NVIDIA Riva TNT2 Review. AnandTech's Slot-1/Socket-370 test configuration was as follows:

• Intel Intel Pentium II 400 and Intel Celeron 266 (0KB L2)
• ABIT BH6 Revision 2.0 i440BX Motherboard
• 64MB of Memman/Mushkin SEC Original SDRAM was used in each test system
• Western Digital 8.4GB Ultra ATA/33 HDD
• Microsoft Windows 98
• DirectX 6.1
• NVIDIA TNT2 reference drivers (build 172)

The benchmark software used was as follows:

• id Software's Quake 2 Version 3.20 using demo1.dm2 and 3Finger's crusher.dm2
• Monolith's Shogo using 3Finger's RevDemo
• Interplay's Descent3 Demo2 using AnandTech's Descent3 Torture Demo
• Ziff Davis' Winbench 99 at 1600 x 1200 x 32-bit color for 2D performance tests

Each benchmark was run a total of three times and the average frame rates taken. Vsync was disabled.

Performance Summary

With the help of more memory (32MB vs. 16MB) and SGRAM (instead of SDRAM), the S320 II-32 provides for a 5-10% performance increase over its 16MB SDRAM brother, the S320 II-16. The biggest difference occurs with the combination of high resolutions and 32-bit rendering where on-board memory for textures becomes much more scarce.

Overclocking to 150/170 provided a boost of 1-8fps on the Pentium II/400. The least gain was in Crusher and the most in demo 1. On the Celeron 266 system, the card is clearly CPU limited and virtually no gains were found by overclocking.

Basically, the Leadtek S320 II-32 will perform virtually identically to other TNT2's with the same clock rate and RAM. With that said, Leadtek has the high clock speed for a standard TNT2 of those currently announced, and as such will perform better than those products. And for those of you that don't want to worry about overclocking, the Leadtek comes set to that clock speed out of the box and is gauranteed by Leadtek to perform stably at that speed.

Conclusion

The TNT2's performance abilities are now quite clear. It is currently the fastest available chipset that also has a complete 3D featureset. Leadtek's S320 II is much like most other TNT2 cards that will be available shortly with a few additional features that make a big difference. First is the addition of a cooling fan, but a number of other cards will have that too. More importantly, that fan allows Leadtek to confidently clock their non-ultra TNT2 at 140MHz for the core by default, compared to most competitors who will follow NVIDIA's recommended 125MHz default setting. Granted, you will be able to overclock many other TNT2 cards to this level of performance, but it is nice to know that the S320 II is guaranteed and tested by the manufacturer to attain those speeds. There is also the use of SGRAM on board, which may provide for a slight performance advantage. If that is not enough, the S320 II is one of the few TNT2 cards that you can actually go out and buy today. At about $180, it is a bit pricey, but as more TNT2 cards become available, prices will fall inline with competitors.

Of course, if you can wait, a number of companies will be shipping their TNT2 products, including the ultra TNT2, in the coming weeks. Diamond's V770 and their V770 Ultra will be hitting the streets shortly, as will cards from ASUS, Guillemot, and many others. The race for the perfect TNT2 card is just beginning, not to mention the TNT2 pricewars which will soon erupt as more and more manufacturers provide their TNT2 entries into the market. Those that are impatient (or those that are in dire need of a 3D accelerator today) will have no problem going for the S320 II, however the more patient will probably want to wait at least another week or two to see exactly what pops up.