By volt - April 12, 2003

Introduction

About Gainward

Gainward has been founded in 1984 by Thomson C.S. Lee. Since then, the company has been devoted to developing the most advanced graphics accelerators in the industry whilst insuring the highest level of customer satisfaction. During those 19 years, Gainward has become a leading producer of Video Capture Cards, TV Tuners but mainly bleeding edge 3D accelerators powered by NVIDIA.

In 2001, Gainward became NVIDIA’s Certified Select Solution Provider and NVIDIA Launch Partner for the European System Builder market.

Naming Scheme

For those that don’t know, Gainward has become one of the leading manufacturers of NVIDIA based 3D Accelerators. Ever since the launch of PowerPack! series their cards have gained a lot of respect. The Gainward GeForce PowerPack! Ultra/650-8X XP “Golden Sample” is no different. The board is based on NV28 chip (NV25 with AGP8x). There are no other major differences from a regular Ti4200. You will read more about the features later on.

PowerPack!:

• A series which designates the high performance Gainward graphics cards. “Hand-picked boards”, high performing and nicely bundled video adapters.

Ultra/650-8X:

• As all card manufacturers, Gainward too has their own naming scheme. The 650-8x basically means that it’s based on NVIDIA’s Ti4200 GPU (NV25) and the 8x stands for AGP8x support (which currently makes no difference, but more about this later on). Ultra? This is how companies market their products ?

XP:

• This is a recent addition to the PowerPack! series. Simply, those products that bear this tag, support Gainward's award-winning VIVO (Video-In/Video-out) technology:

XP feature provides two video-in connectors and two video-out connectors (both composite video and s-video for PAL and NTSC) for smooth video recording and video editing including accelerated DVD playback with enhanced motion compensation in hardware.

Golden Sample:

• All products that carry this name-tag guarantee outstanding stability and performance at a slightly increased clock speeds.

 

About The Review

While this is my first review here at nVnews, I will try to make it detailed and as pleasurable to read as possible. I dedicate this article to gamers looking for a mid-range graphics card. Albeit it’s not a high-end VGA board, I will demonstrate that this card is worth buying. The article will contain quite a few game benchmarks and image quality tests. There are a lot of reviews of this (or similar version) card. I’m hoping my article will be portrayed differently than those you have already read. Again, my benchmarks and conclusions will be based on how games perform with this card. You will see only few synthetic benchmarks for comparison, and I will not talk about it more than I have to. The ‘Onion’ test will be there only to give you an idea of how the scores vary between the two cards (Ti4200 and Ti4600, both from Gainward).

If you look at Clays review he also starts off with the naming scheme. No we didn't copy each other's review hehe. Both of us simply acknowledged the fact that Gainward has some weird naming convention and that a further explanation is needed. When Clay posted his review, I rushed out and emailed him about it. He wasn't surprised at all.

Let’s begin shall we?