The Chaintech Desperado
AGP-RI70 GeForce 256

Friday, June 02, 2000


Introduction

Chaintech, a longtime manufacturer of both motherboards and graphics cards, has recently released their very own GeForce 256 card. Chaintech is a Taiwanese manufacturer that is less than well known in North America, but who's many devices are considered the wonder of the technological market by most tech connoisseurs. The Desperado AGP-RI70 that we have in our lab, in fact, represents the very fine edge of Chaintech's technology.

The RI70 is aimed to be another graphics card solution for the small-budget market. It arrives equipped with S-Video Out, but asides from that, seems practically identical to every other GeForce 256 card on the market.

The RI70 comes equipped with 32MB of 166MHz memory, and a GPU clocked to 120MHz. The memory in use is from ESMT, and is rated for a speed of 5ns, which means it could theoretically be pushed to 200MHz without problems.

   

The particularities

Asides from the S-Video Out, the Desperado RI70 is essentially a copy of the Nvidia reference design. The ESMT memory installed is rated for 5ns, which should normally allow it to run at 200MHz. To reach that speed will take a bit of Overclocking, though, as the RI70 arrives with the memory set to 166MHz.

Next: The particularities (continued)

Technical Specifications

Interface AGP 2.0 compliant
4x AGP support / 2x AGP compliant
Chipset
nVIDIA GeForce256 256-bit GPU
RAMDAC : 350MHz
Memory 32MB SDRAM
Resolution Maximum 2048 ?1536  32bit color
Features
  • nVIDIA QuadEngine.
  • 15M Polygons / sec , 480M Pixels / des.
  • 32-bit ARGB rendering with destination alpha.
  • 32-bit Z-buffer / stencil.
  • DVD and HDTV-ready motion compensation for MPEG-2 decoding.
TV-out ( Optional )
  • DirectShow , MPEG-1 , MPEG-2 , Indeo
  • NTSC / PAL
  • RCA TV-output / S-Video output jack
  • Resolution 800 ?600
Miscellaneous
  • VESA DPMS
  • DDC2 monitor communication
  • Acceleration for Windows 95/98 and Windows NT 4.0 / 2000

 

 

Rev.0.1
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