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.
