NVIDIA GeForce2/3 Titanium Roundup - January 2002

Gainward GeForce2 Ti/500 XP VIVO Golden Sample

Gainward GeForce2 Ti/500 XP VIVO Golden Sample
Click to Enlarge
GPU	NVIDIA GeForce2 Ti 200
Memory	64MB EtronTech DDR SDRAM 4.0ns
Cooling - Core	Circular fan/heatsink combo
Cooling - Memory	(4) 8 fin RAMsinks
Temperature - Core	120 F / 48.9 C
TV-Out	S- Video and Composite Philips SAA7108E
Video-In	S- Video and Composite Philips SAA7108E
Highest Overclock	295/505 MHz
Software/Gaming Bundle	WinDVD, Uled Videostudio SE DVD Edition
Average Online Price	$125.00

The Gainward GeForce2 Ti/500 XP VIVO Golden Sample set itself apart from the pack as soon as we plugged the card into our testbed, as the card arrived boasting a 260/472MHz clock speed; 10MHz faster in the core and 72MHZ DDR faster in the memory than the stock GeForce2 Ti ships at. This is the first NVIDIA product we have seen in a while to come shipped overclocked, as NVIDIA has erred on the cautious side to prevent cards in their segmented product line from competing with one another. The core and memory clock speed increases came as a welcome surprise and certainly aided out of the box performance.

For cooling, the Gainward GeForce2 Ti/500 XP VIVO Golden Sample featured a unique circular cooling solution on the core. Bonded via a properly applied layer of thermal grease, the 120 degrees Fahrenheit that the card got to was the lowest of all the GeForce2 Ti 200 cards tested, even though the Gainward GeForce2 Ti/500 XP VIVO Golden Sample was running overclocked. On the memory side, the card featured four, 8 finned memory heatsinks, with each RAMsink covering up 2 RAM chips.

As far as extras go, the Gainward GeForce2 Ti/500 XP VIVO Golden Sample has those as well. The card features full VIVO functionality thanks to its onboard Philips SAA7108E video encoder/decoder. TV-out wise the card was able to display at up to 800x600. The software side of the video-input is provided by Ulead's Videostudio package, as many other VIVO cards are.