Leadtek Winfast 3D S320 II-32 TNT2 32MB SGRAM

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.