Wednesday, March 15, 2000

Introduction This time around, though this is indeed another review of an Ultra TNT2 card, I can't be accused of dragging my feet, as this product is absolutely new on the market. Abit, an habitual maker of quality motherboards, has - with this product - thrown its hat into the ring of high-performance graphics cards. The Siluro name covers an entire family of Abit graphics cards, with the 4 family memboers being the GT2 Ultra - an Ultra TNT2 card, the GT2V - based around the TNT2 Pro chipset, the GT2 - a standard TNT2 card, and the GF256 - which is of the latest GeForce 256 generation.

With the Siluro family, Abit clearly has its bases covered, as far as graphics cards are concerned. That said, let's now take a look at the GT2 Ultra TNT2, and see what its made of.

Description

The GT2 Ultra is no more, or less than a standard Ultra TNT2 graphics card. For all intents, the feature set of the GT2 Ultra makes it indistinguishable from any other Ultra TNT2 card on the market.

Comparable on all points to the Diamond Viper 770 Ultra, the GT2 Ultra uses 5ns memory clocked to 183Mhz by default, and a graphics processor clocked to 150Mhz, with the Ramdac rolling along at 300Mhz. The Abit Siluro GT2 Ultra TNT2 includes 32MB if SDRAM memory. As for specifications, we can pretty much refer to the identical reference specs from NVidia. Otherwise, for our tests, we've chosen to implement the NVidia Detonnator 3.68 drivers. Abit also uses the NVidia Overclocking utility to push its boards past the mark, but we prefered to use the PowerStrip utility.

Installation.

Installation of the Abit GT2 Ultra was no more or less complicated than installing any other graphics card; essentially, installtion is a summer's walk through the park.

The software bundle.

The software bundle that accompanies the GT2 Ultra includes: drivers with Overclocking utility, the Win DVD v1.3.5 utility for playing DVDs, a CD version of the user's manual, the PDF document reader - Adobe Acrobat Reader, a utility for flashing the card's BIOS, Graphics Max, DirectX 7, and Album View. Two additional CDs contain: Test Drive 5, and Shogo Mobile Armor.

Hardware bundle

From a material perspective, the card comes with a 1-meter S-Video cable, and a user's manual.

Next: The tests.