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InnoVISION Tornado GeForce2 Ti


Date
: 12/25/01 – 01:52:45 AM

Author
:

Category
: Video Cards

Page 1 : Introduction

Manufacturer: InnoVISION
Price: Around $100

Introduction

You probably still remember last week's GeForce2 Ti review quite well. We reviewed ProLink's GeForce2 Ti offering along with the GeForce2 Titanium GPU from nVidia. We also mentioned that the memory on the Prolink card runs 40MHz above specs by default. Because of this, the card had an obvious advantage over the avarage GeForce2 Ti based videocard. I believe this is quite understandable.

Today, we're about to have a look at InnoVISION's ('InnoVISION Multimedia' in full or 'Inno3D' in short) Tornado GF2 Ti videocard. We were very eager to check this one out because the previous InnoVISION product we reviewed here at the O² labs had managed to impress us alot (I'm refering to the InnoVISION Geforce2 MX400 review). As the name of the card already states, the card is based upon the nVidia GF2 Ti GPU. The specs of this GPU and the differences between the Ti and the Pro/Ultra have all been explained in our Prolink GF2 Ti review we did last week, BUT to make it easy for you, we'll quote some words in this review as well. Isn't that nice? ;)

The Prolink GF2 Ti review already proved that a videocard based on the Geforce2 Ti GPU is a good product at a low price. But we also mentioned that small differences like extras, gifts and stuff can convince one to buy a more expensive videocard over a slightly cheaper one. Can the Inno3D GeForce2 Ti impress us as much as their MX400 did a couple of months ago? What can we expect in the box? How does the card perform and stack up? And more important : How high can we overclock it? :)

Let's start with a quick look at the specifications …

Page 2 : Specifications

Specifications

Here's a small copy/paste from the Inno3D Tornada GF2 Ti specifications page :

NVIDIA® GeForce2 Ti GPU

- The first shading GPU with nVIDIA Shading Rasterizer and a High Definition Video Processor (HDVP)
- The first Real-time, per-pixel shading processor
- 2nd Generation Transform and Lighting architecture
- 350MHz RAMDAC
- 64MB Double Data Rate(DDR) DRAM on board
- AGP 4X with Fast Write supported
- Driver optimized for Pentium III SSE, AMD 3DNow
- DirectX 7.0 and OpenGL ICD drivers supported
- HDVP (High Definition Video Processor) supports all ATSC resolutions, including 720p and 1080i

Tornado GeForce2 Titanium 3D Accelerator

- 64MB Double Data Rate (DDR) DRAM
- 6.4GB/Sec total memory bandwidth
- AGP 4X/2X, AGP Texturing and Fast Write supported
- ATX / MicroATX / AT form factor board

Software Driver

- Single pass multi-texturing support (DirectX 7) and OpenGL (IC)
- Microsoft® Windows® XP, Windows® ME, Windows® 2000 and Windows® 9X support

System Requirements

IBM® PC or 100% IBM® PC compatible
- Intel Pentium 4, Pentium III, AMD K7 with 3Dnow
- One available AGP 2.0 complaint AGP Bus Slot
- CD-Rom drive
- 64MB System Memory
- 50MB available disk space
- Microsoft® Windows® XP, Windows® 2000, Windows® 9X or Windows® NT
- SVGA multi-frequency compatible monitor

Detailed Specs

The Inno3D Tornado GeForce2 Titanium has a nifty looking black PCB. This looks really cool in every case but looks even more cool when you have a motherboard which also has a black PCB. Never say the looks of a card isn't important!

Let's see what our Inno3D has got under the hood … MY GOD, it's a GF2 Ti. What exactly does this new GPU from nVidia offer us in terms of features, performance and memory specs? Well, we explained that pretty well in our previous GF2 Ti review so here's a little quote from that article. Just read it and you'll be able to chat along about it with every hardware expert :p

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.

See … now don't tell me that wasn't easy to comprehend. The PCB looks really basic and has the same board layout as pretty much every GF2 Ti card I know. Nothing to get all turned on about here :p Now let's have a closer look at the black PCB and see what's on it. Well, of course, we have the GeForce2 Ti GPU running at 250MHz covered with a small heatsink and fan. The HSF has somekind of Orb-shaped design which should enable us to do some overclocking later on. I don't know if we can reach the core's limits with this small HSF alone, but since the core speed on a GF2 Ti isn't all that important, the stock HSF will do just fine.

The Inno3D GF2 Ti sample we received comes with 64MB of Samsung ns DDR RAM chips clocked at 400MHz. You can only buy a GF2 Ti card with this amount of memory. This is actually a very good thing, because some other manufacturers also offer cards with only 32MB of DDR RAM to lower the pricetag. But don't let this confuse you guys, because a GF2 needs 64MB to achieve its full performance. If you can't afford a 64MB version, don't go out and buy a card with only 32MB because you'll regret it later! That's my advice to you ;)

That's about all there is to say about the layout of this videocard. There's no onboard TV-Out decoder or some other extra on this board. However, there seems to be plenty of room on the PCB for Inno3D to mount a TV-Out chip and add optical DVI output support to the card … There's also a hole in the bracket next to Sub-D connector to mount an S-Video Out connector. I do like to note that such features only increase the pricetag and aren't essential elements to create a good videocard.

What can you expect to find inside the retail box?

- Inno3D Tornado GeForce2 Titanium Videocard
- Small User Manual
- Inno3D Universal Driver CD
- Inno3D MegaPack Bundle

The stuff I described above is packed very well in a small box. The user manual is very small. It has only one page which actually describes some installation procedures. The remaining pages consist of the specs and some pics. Not the best manual I've seen so far :( The driver CD doesn't contain the latest nVidia detonator drivers which is pretty normal because new drivers show up almost every week. So I guess it's best that you always download the latest drivers from the nVidia website or from our servers. (Note that Inno3D offers deto 21.83 as the newest driver for nVidia-based products on their website. We know that's already history for a long time!)

Then we have the MegaPack Bundle … This is something we only see inside retail Inno3D boxes. The bundle consists of 1 game, 2 programs and 1 clipart CD. (The driver CD is also in this bundle)

- GAME : 'Midnight GT' from Rage Games Ltd. is an avarage racing game that only uses half of the GF2 Ti's power. This game is not the best bonus in this package if you ask me.

- PROGRAMS : 'Ulead PhotoImpact 5' is a nice image editor that offers computer graphics enthusiasts an affordable, comprehensive image-editing product for any image editing task. It's a great program, but I still prefer Adobe Photoshop. The second piece of software you get is called 'WinDVD 2000' from InterVideo. WinDVD 2000 is a rather old software DVD player for the PC. It's not a bad program, but my preference goes to PowerDVD … but that's just a matter of personal favor heh!

- CLIP ART CD : This CD is called 'InnoCreation ClipArt collection' in full and includes Graphics Animation files, ClipArts and Photo quality images for you to use in combination with PhotoImpact 5 for example. Not bad!

Now that we know what to expect inside the Tornado package, I can't wait any longer to move on to the overclocking part of the review! Just click the link, so we can get this show on the road …

Page 3 : Overclocking

Overclocking

I've said it before and I'll say it again … Overclocking a videocard is easier than stealing money from a blind man. The only thing(s) you need are the Coolbits registry hack OR any type of videocard overclocking software. My favorite application for this job is Powerstrip. This app allows you to adjust the core and memory speed of any recent videocard.

Because the memory on a GF2 Ti runs at 'only' 400MHz, your primary objective should always be to increase this memory clock as much as possible. The best way to do this is to have RAM sinks on top of every RAM chip. Sadly enough, the Inno3D GF2 Ti card doesn't come with RAM sinks and considering the fact that the card features only 5ns RAM chips, I didn't expect shocking overclocking results, but then again … you never know huh! As I said before, the HSF on the GPU doesn't like that much of a performer either.

After experimenting with the core/memory speed settings for about two whole days and many lockups later, I was pretty sure of the limits of our Tornado. The core seemed to be maxed out at 270MHz which is only a 20MHz increase compared to the stock speed. The memory does a slightly better job as it could reach 460MHz before artifacts and stability issues started showing up. That's 60MHz out of specs which is not bad at all. The overclocked GeForce2 Ti (270/460) is now clocked at GeForce2 Ultra levels and should perform nicely in the benchmarks, shouldn't it?

Let's have a look at 3DMark2k1 and Quake3 …

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

3DMARK2001

Quake 3 Arena v1.17 – Demo001

Quake 3 Arena v1.17 – Torture Demo

Well, it looks like the InnoVISION GeForce2 Ti videocard can compete with other similar products on the market. Why shouldn't it? The stock Tornado GF2 Ti features a 250/400 core/memory clock just as most GeForce2 Ti's out there. The Prolink GF2 Ti you see on the benchmark graphics runs a little faster at stock speed but that's only because the memory on that card runs 40MHz faster by default. Just like every GF2 Ti, this Inno3D videocard performs somewhere between a GeForce2 Pro and Ultra … but at a much lower price ;)

Page 5 : Conclusion

Conclusion

Good

- Performs good
- Value for money – cheaper than many similar products!
- Stability
- Tweakable up to GeForce2 Ultra levels

Bad

- No cooling on the memory chips
- Heatsink on the GPU could be bigger
- Not the wildest Ti overclock in history
- Less than avarage MegaPack Bundle

InnoVISION don't have themselves a bad videocard with this Tornado GeForce2 Ti. Not at all! Sadly enough, the sample we received didn't overclock to levels I had hoped for. Why? Well, the card doesn't come with 4ns RAM, it should have a better heatsink on the core and there should be RAM sinks on top of the RAM chips. This would have enabled us to clock the card much higher than we have now. The quality of the MegaPack Bundle is also very poor and I don't think much customers who bought and will buy this package in the future will even bother to open the MegaPack Bundle execpt to use the driver CD maybe. So far the bad things about the Tornada GF2 Ti box … it also has good sides of course! For example, the GeForce2 Ti core on which this card is based is a sweet GPU which allows it's users to enjoy all their games at high resolution and high framerates. Although I said before that the Inno3D Tornado GF2 Ti doesn't overclock to unseen heights, you can tweak this cheap card to achieve a performance similar to that of a much more expensive GeForce2 Ultra card. A excellent way to upgrade that TNT2 in your rig!