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Prolink PixelView GeForce2 Ti


Date
: 12/17/01 – 04:57:27 PM

Author
:

Category
: Video Cards

Page 1 : Introduction

Manufacturer: Prolink
Price: Around $150.

Introduction

When was the last time you saw a video card review here at Overclockers Online? Alright, I agree, it has been a while. But all that changes today because we're about the have a look at a videocard that has managed to draw our attention. I'm talking about the Prolink Pixelview GeForce2 Ti. That's right, the GeForce2 "Ti", which is short for Titanium, is how nVidia likes to call their new line of videocards. Besides the Geforce2 Ti, who is about to replace the GTS, Pro and Ultra, we can also buy cards based on a GeForce3 Ti 200 or GeForce3 Ti 500 GPU. This way, nVidia has itself a value GF3 GPU and a high end one. But, as we're not discussing the GeForce3 today, I'll just continue with discussing the GeForce2 Titanium.

Did you already know the company "Prolink" before you started reading this review? All I know is that Prolink isn't all that famous here in Europe. That's why Prolink has started shipping kick-ass products lately and they've let us know that their goal is to take over the world ;)

In this review we will look at what the Prolink Pixelview GF2 Ti has to offer in terms of performance, stability, overclocking potential, board layout and extras. If you're interested in learning how our GeForce2 Titanium performs compared to a GF2 Pro/Ultra and a GeForce3, just sit back, read on and let O² handle all the work for you!

Let's start with a look at the specifications …

Page 2 : Specifications

Specifications

To make your life even easier, I've put a copy/paste from the Prolink Pixelview GF2 Ti below :

Optimal performance GeForce2 Ti GPU

- nVIDIA 2nd-Generatioin 256-bit GPU architecture
- Integrated hardware transform engine
- Integrated hardware lighting engine
- nVIDIA Shading Rasterizer
- Real- time per-pixel effects
- Cube environment mapping
- Up to 1 billion texel fill rate
- Up to 31 million triangle/sec
- Up to 6.4GB/sec memory bandwidth
    

Tremendous realistic 3D scene

- Full acceleration for Microsoft DirectX 8 and OpenGL 1.2 ICD
- 4 anisotropic filtrered pixels/clock
- 8 texture-mapped, filtered, lit texels per clock cycle
- Single pass multi-texturing
- 32-bit Z/stencil buffer
- Anti-aliasing: full scene, order independent
- High Quality Texture Filtering, including Anisotropic
- Advanced per-pixel, perspective-correct texturing
- DirectX and S3 texture compression
- Maximum 3D resolution of 2048 x 1536 @75Hz
    

High-performance 2D rendering engine

- Optimized for 32-, 24-,16-, 15- and 8-bpp modes
- True-color hardware cursor
- Multi-buffering (double, triple or quad) for smooth animation and video playback
    

High-quality HDTV/DVD playback

- High-Definition Video Processor for full-screen, full-frame video playback of HDTV and DVD content
- Independent hardware color controls for video overlay
- Hardware color-space conversion (YUV 4:2:2 and 4:2:0)
- Motion compensation
- 5-tap horizontal by 3-tap vertical filtering
- 8:1 up/down scaling
- Per-pixel color keying
- Multiple video windows supported for CSC and filtering
- DVD sub-picture alpha-blended compositing
    

Vivid TV Output / Video inout

- High quality video output to big screen for game playing and presentation. (only for TV-Out model )
- Supports Composite and S-Video output (only for TV-Out model )
- Supports Video input (only for TV-Out model )
  

Supports Drivers

- nVIDIA Unified Driver Architecture increase more performance
- Windows 9x/ME/XP, NT4.0, Win2K, Display drivers
- Support DirectDraw, Direct3D DirectVideo, ActiveX
- OpenGL ICD for Win9x/ME, NT, Win2K and Linux
- DirectX 8.0 compatibility

Detailed Specs

You should know by now that the videocard we're discussing today is based on the new GeForce2 GPU from nVidia, the GF2 Ti. So what exactly does this 'Titanium' stand for? Well, it's all pretty easy to comprehend. Allow me to explain some things.

The GeForce2 Titanium GPU offers the exact same nVidia features as the older GeForce2 line-up. So where's the difference, you might ask. nVidia's idea behind the production of the GF2 Ti was to produce a GPU with the power of a high end GeForce2 GPU and the price of a value GPU (let's say something like a Geforce2 MX400).

Basically, it all comes down to one conclusion : The GeForce2 Ti is nothing more than a GeForce2 Ultra core equiped with the memory of a 'slower' GeForce2 Pro! The core/memory of the GeForce2 Ti is clocked at 250/400 while the GeForce2 PRO is clocked at 200/400 and the GeForce2 Ultra is running at a sweet 250/460 (in MHz)! This means the memory on the GF2 Ultra runs 60MHz faster than that of a GF2 Ti. 60MHz doesn't sound all that much, but if you know the memory bandwidth is a real bottleneck on GeForce2 videocards, you'll understand that 60MHz more can improve performance quite a lot. That's also the reason why a GF2 Ultra still has a 1GB/sec advantage over the GF2 Ti in terms of memory bandwidth. The GF2 Ti has a memory bandwidth of 6.4GB/sec while the GF2 Ultra can handle 7.4GB/sec. That's the ONE and ONLY difference between the GeForce2 Ti and a good old GeForce2 Ultra! Alright then, I hope the idea behind the GF2 Ti has become a little more clear now.

So far, so good! Now that you know what a GF2 Ti GPU can do, I believe it's time to see what kind of videocard Prolink managed to produce based on this GPU. First of all, I have to say the layout is pretty basic. Everthing has been put together on a yellow-brown PCB based on a reference design. Oh yeah, I've seen many Ti cards with the exact same design. But hey, is that a bad thing? Well, it doesn't have to be. The GeForce2 Ti GPU is hiding itself behind the heatsink of course. What is there to say about that heatsink? Well, one thing that caught my eye is that it certainly is not an Orb-shaped heatsink. And it should be more than sufficient to cool down the GPU. However, don't enter the world of hardcore videocard overclocking with this heatsink alone, but as you will see later on in this review, the stock HSF will also deliver some nice overclocking results ;)

Our Prolink Pixelview GF2 Ti came with 64MB of Samsung 4ns RAM chips clocked at 440MHz. You can also buy the exact same card with only 32MB of RAM, but that will decrease performance a lot, so don't do that!

If you think that once you've seen a GF2 Ti card, you've seen them, then I only partially agree with that statement. Most of the GF2 Ti card out there are all pretty much the same products, but it are small things that sometimes make one hell of difference, not only if you look at the pricetag, but also in terms of quality, overclocking potential, extra features and so on. For example, the Prolink Pixelview GF2 Ti we're looking at today comes with TV-Out capabilities which is great if you like the watch divx movies on your TV or something like that. The TV-Out feature of the card is powered by the Conexant Bt869KRF chipset and can deliver a TV-Out resolution of 800×600 which is not bad at all if your TV is not that huge. Of course, the quality of a TV screen is not as good as the image quality of your monitor, but it still is acceptable. So I guess that if you don't really need TV-Out on your videocard, I suggest you buy the model without TV-Out and save yourselves some $$$.

What can you expect to find inside the box?

- Prolink Pixelview GF2 Ti videocard
- TV-Out cables
- Small manual
- Driver CD

As you can see, the package is really basic. You don't get extra stuff like games, pens, Tshirts, etc. That's probably because Prolink wants to sell their GF2 Ti as cheap as possible. And think about it folks … Do you really need these avarage bonus games and stuff? I certainly don't! The manual in the box is very small, but contains all the information you'll want to know about the card, the TV-Out feature and how to install the drivers. What more can you ask for in a manual?

Now that we know what the package of our Prolink videocard looks like on the inside, I assume you're eager to find out how high we could overclock this baby! The answer can be found on the next page!

Page 3 : Overclocking

Overclocking

Overclocking a videocard is really a piece of cake. You simply install the Coolbits registry hack or some kind of videocard overclocking software like Powerstrip. This way, you can adjust the core and memory speed of your videocard. Considering the fact that the memory of the fastest GeForce2, the GeForce2 Ultra, runs 60MHz faster than our GF2 Ti's memory, my goal was to achieve nothing less than GF2 Ultra memory speeds!

Before starting an overclocking adventure, always check out the cooling on the hardware you're trying to push over its specs ;) Never forget that heat is and always will be the enemy of every overclocker. The heatsink on top of the GPU is good enough to overclock the core to its limits, but a real bottleneck on this card is the lack of RAM sinks on top of the Samsung DDR RAM chips. A major increase of memory speed will lead to much higher performance. On the other hand, a 30MHz increase of the core clock will not make that much of a difference because the GPU is already limited by the memory bandwidth.

As you read in the specifaction part of this review, all GeForce2 Ti videocards are clocked at a nice 250/400 core/memory speed, but Prolink decided to clock theirs at 250/440 by default simply because they're using Samsung 4ns DDR RAM chips instead of 5ns chips. After experimenting with core/memory speed settings for a whole afternoon, I finally came to a conclusion. The core is maxed out at 280MHz (250MHz by default) and the memory reached its limit at 475MHz (400MHz by default) before small artifacts started showing up. 475MHz … that's a 75MHz increase which results in our GF2 Ti being clocked faster than a GF2 Ultra. The downside is that 4ns memory should be able to perform even better than 475MHz. But hey, it still is a sweet overclock.

Let's see what this overclocking can do to our framerate!

Page 4 : Benchmarking

Benchmarking

Test System :

- AMD Athlon Tbird 1.4GHz
- EPoX 8KHA+ KT266A Mainboard
- Vantec CCK-6035 Heatsink
- Crucial PC2100 DDR RAM
- Prolink Pixelview GF2 Ti videocard
- InnoVISION GF2 Ti videocard
- Visiontek GeForce3 videocard
- IBM 20GB UDMA100 7200rpm hard drive
- Win2k + SP2 + VIA 4in1 4.35
- Deto 21.83

As you can see on the charts, the Prolink GeForce2 Ti does a mighty fine job in all our benchmarks. Although it can't overpower the GeForce3, which is quite normal, the GF2 Ti shows an amazing amout of power for a value card with such an attractive pricetag. The stock GF2 Ti performs somewhere between the GeForce2 Pro and the GeForce2 Ultra … but as soon as we start to overclock the Ti, performance jumps right up to the sky with benchmarks results coming close to GeForce3 values. Not bad for what's supposed to be THE new value card :)

Page 5 : Conclusion

Conclusion

Good

- Sweet performance
- Great value for money
- Tweakable
- TV-Out

Bad

- No cooling on the memory chips
- Heatsink on the GPU could be bigger
- No software bundle (is this really a bad thing??)

If we look at the pricetag and performance of this Prolink Pixelview GF2 Ti, the only conclusion we can draw is that Prolink have themselves a winner with this videocard. The card doesn't overclock too bad and offers GeForce2 Ultra performance against the price of almost any other value videocard. Isn't that great? If you're looking for a great card to play your games at high resolutions and you don't want to spend all your $$$ on an expensive GeForce3 videocard, than a GF2 Ti like the Prolink we've discussed today is your logical choice. And don't forget the TV-Out feature which also guarantees hours of fun watching divx movies on your TV screen. The Prolink Pixelview GeForce2 Ti … an excellent Christmas gift if you ask me! :D