Tuesday, November 28, 2000

The drivers

The drivers that were supplied with the GF2000 were none other than v4.12.01.0530, though we opted for the Nvidia reference drivers v4.12.01.0618 for our tests. A casual test of the former revealed an 8% inferiority in speed in comparison to the later. As a result, we recommend v4.12.01.0618, despite reports of memory bugs associated with the newer drivers.

Overclocking

By default, the GF2000's memory is clocked at 166MHz (for an effective rate of 333MHz), with the graphics core set for a frequency of 166Mhz. Note that the drivers that are supplied with the card include Gigabyte's own Overclocking utility that you can see pictured below. With a little help from PowerStrip 2.75.02, we were able to Overclock the GF2000's memory to 410MHz, and it graphics core to 225MHz, for an overall gain of about 1.5%. If we 've chosen to use Powerstrip instead of the included Overclocking utility, it is only because we didn't used Gigabyte's drivers but tNvidia's reference drivers.

The software bundle

Asides from the drivers themselves, the installation CD includes a few utilities: Benchmark Final Reality, the PowerPlayer SE multimedia player, the PowerDVD video-disk player, and Adobe Acrobat Reader. The GF2000 is also escorted by DirectX 7, as well as several games: Populous (The Beginning), Future COP L.A.P.D, SuperBike World Championship, and Need for Speed III - which is supplied on a second CD.

Next: The test setup.