After all we've heard and read about the GeForce 3, it's about time that we received our very own GeForce 3 graphics card for testing - courtesy of Visiontek, the first manufacturer to bring the card to market.

Since we've already taken a close look at the many new technologies behind the GeForce3 and the NV20 chipset, this article will instead be focussing on measuring the card's real-world performance. Reader's who have no previous knowledge of the GeForce3 are encouraged to click on the link to get the low-down on the GF3's new innards.

For the purposes of this analysis, we'll be comparing the GeForce3 to our GeForce2 GTS 64MB reference card.

We'll also be conducting a numerous Overclocking tests in order to determine just how far Visiontek's card can be pushed.

At its heart, the Visiontek GeForce3 is composed primarily of the NV20 AO5 stepping chipset clocked at 200MHz, a 350MHz RAMDAC, and 64Mb of EliteMT DDR memory rated for 3.8ns latency.

Thus, the Visiontek GF3 can easily keep its stride at speeds of 263.16MHz, for a DDR transfer-rate of 526.32MHz.

That said, Visiontek has kept very close to the Nvidia reference design by setting the GPU core to 200MHz, while the memory oscillates at 230MHz (460MHz DDR). As a result, we can probably expect to have a lot of fun Overclocking this card later on in our analysis.