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Leadtek WinFast A400 Ultra TDH Review August 02, 2004 Brandon Sandman Bell |
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Summary: Looking for a GeForce 6800 Ultra card with a little more features than your typical reference design? Leadtek's WinFast A400 Ultra TDH may be just the card for you! Leadtek replaces the stock aluminum cooler with an all-copper unit that runs quieter than NVIDIA's reference cooling, and even overclocks their board from the factory for added performance. To top if all off, the card ships with a nice game bundle. See how this card stacks up to the reference 6800 Ultra and ATI's X800 XT Platinum Edition with NVIDIA's new 61.77 driver in today's review!
 Introduction | Page:: ( 1 / 21 ) |
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Typically when an independent hardware vendor (IHV) like ATI or NVIDIA releases a new GPU, innovation among their board partners is pretty scarce – everyone relies on the reference design. This is caused by a couple of factors:
The most important reason is also the simplest – both IHVs handle all board production on the first generation of their high-end $400+ graphics cards. This means that regardless of the manufacturer you choose, the card itself has come from the same source. NVIDIA has relied on Flextronics in the past while ATI has partnered with PC Partner (Sapphire), although in the case of X800 we’ve heard they’ve switched to Celestica.
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This development began in the GeForce3 days and was magnified in the GeForce4 era. Graphics board designs became more complicated with these cards, GeForce4 Ti 4400/Ti 4600’s required six-layer printed circuit boards (PCBs) with high-speed BGA DDR memory. NVIDIA also wanted to ensure a consistent level of quality among their board partners after receiving a spate of complaints from TNT2/GeForce users who had purchased cards from lesser-known manufacturers; these consumers would sometimes turn around and blame NVIDIA.
Slowly but surely, NVIDIA became less focused on solely providing chips (leaving all production-related issues to their board partners), and more of a quasi-card manufacturer. You can even see this in older press releases, where NVIDIA would provide bulk pricing for their graphics chips. Imagine an NVIDIA press release today with this kind of information for GeForce 6800 Ultra!
Speaking of the GeForce 6800 Ultra, these are some of the most complex boards to manufacture in the graphics market. The power requirements and cooling required for these GPUs are well documented, as is the 6800 Ultra’s GDDR3 memory clocked at 1.1GHz. We’ve also heard that NVIDIA uses 12-layer PCBs for the Ultra due to its high clock speeds.
Designing and then manufacturing a board as intricate as this is expensive, time-consuming work. With board partners already in a race with each other to get their boards to market first, there just isn’t enough time to come up with a custom board design, not to mention the fact that many board partners simply don’t have the resources to pull it all off successfully.
Instead, board partners will focus on other things, such as game bundles, or providing extra features like faster memory, better cooling, or video input support (VIVO). Each company will find their niche and focus on it, with their goal being to provide the best possible experience for their core audience.
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Leadtek caters to the high-end enthusiast, the guy who wants the Ferrari of graphics cards. Stock designs aren’t enough for Leadtek’s engineers, who are constantly seeking to improve on NVIDIA’s hardware. This is a pretty tall order to accomplish in today’s cutthroat market, but Leadtek has managed to do just that. Their GeForce 5900 Ultra card we reviewed last year featured an effective copper-based cooler with a ducted enclosure, while their GeForce 5900 XT card we reviewed in our 5900 XT roundup shipped with 2.2ns Hynix memory, good for 900MHz. We received emails from many of you that purchased that board based on our article and got 2.2ns boards.
For GeForce 6800 Ultra, Leadtek has once again chosen to deviate from other NVIDIA board partners with their GeForce 6800 Ultra card. Rather than cut and paste NVIDIA’s reference card, Leadtek has come up with something a little more unique than the other first generation GeForce 6800 Ultra cards.
| Board analysis | Page:: ( 2 / 21 ) |
Higher clocks
While NVIDIA is handling all early GeForce 6800 Ultra board production themselves, board partners such as Leadtek do have the option of making some modifications to their cards. In fact, it seems as if NVIDIA’s board partners have been given more leeway as of late with their high-end $400+ cards, especially in the realm of clock speeds.
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Typically when a new GPU is introduced, NVIDIA provides little or no flexibility in allowing board partners to deviate from the reference clock speeds for their first crop of cards. Clock speed adjustment usually doesn’t occur until the second or third generation of cards hits retail, when board partners are desperate for new ways to distinguish themselves from each other (and their own first generation cards). Keep in mind that this statement applies to flagship card offerings, for their $300 cards, NVIDIA’s board partners are able to produce their own cards, and typically come up with some pretty innovative designs.
This seems to have changed with GeForce 6800 Ultra, as many of NVIDIA’s board partners have been allowed to overclock their boards from the factory, providing their card with more performance than your typical stock GeForce 6800 Ultra. With Leadtek’s core audience being gamers and enthusiasts, it was only natural that they decided to overclock their WinFast A400 Ultra TDH by default.
Leadtek has chosen to bump up the core clock frequency to 425MHz, an improvement of 25MHz over the stock GeForce 6800 Ultra core clock. This nets the card an additional 6% in peak fill rate. Meanwhile, on the memory side, the WinFast A400 Ultra TDH’s memory speed is unchanged at 550MHz (1.1GHz effective).
By overclocking the WinFast A400 Ultra TDH out of the box, Leadtek provides a factory-backed overclocked solution for the gamer who wants a little more performance than stock, with the peace of mind of remaining under warranty. Enthusiasts who really want to push their hardware can still overclock their card manually via NVIDIA’s Coolbits utility.
Copper cooling
The second area where Leadtek deviates from other GeForce 6800 Ultras is in the WinFast A400 Ultra TDH’s cooling. Whereas NVIDIA’s stock 6800 Ultra cooler is aluminum-based, with a heatpipe sitting over the memory modules for increased cooling, Leadtek has decided to integrate their own cooling design that’s composed entirely of copper on the WinFast A400 Ultra TDH.
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Leadtek outfits their card with a massive copper heatsink covering the NV40 core and its memory modules, while a second copper heatsink sits on the bottom of the card. Leadtek then mounts their Air Surround cooling fan on top of all this.
Air Surround is Leadtek’s ducted fan design system. It works by drawing in air from within your case, spreading it across the main copper heatsink. Hot air then exits out the sides of this heatsink. Leadtek then tops the fan off with a dust filter. This is handy for keeping dust out of the fan’s motor, causing it to die prematurely and can be easily removed (for cleaning) with a small Phillip’s screwdriver.
In operation, Leadtek’s cooler runs about 5 decibels quieter than NVIDIA’s reference dual-slot cooler design, but unfortunately this comes at a cost: temperature. We noted temperatures 9 degrees higher on the WinFast A400 Ultra TDH card than a reference GeForce 6800 Ultra running at the same 425MHz clock speed. (45 degrees idle for the reference card, versus 54 degrees Celsius for Leadtek, 58 degrees under load for NVIDIA, 67 degrees running the same load with the Leadtek card). Perhaps if Leadtek cranked up the RPMs so that their noise level matched that of the NVIDIA reference card the temperatures would be a little closer.
Software bundle and accessories
Leadtek offers a pretty solid bundle with the WinFast A400 Ultra TDH. Included in the box are copies of Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow (shipped on DVD) and Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, GunMetal, Big Mutha Truckas, Winfox II, Cult3D, and DVD player software. Hardware accessories include two power adapters with extra Molex connectors, two DVI adapters, an S-Video cable and a component cable for outputting to an HDTV.
| Image quality | Page:: ( 3 / 21 ) |
With NVIDIA releasing a new graphics driver last week, it’s important that we take a look at the WinFast A400 Ultra TDH’s image quality. Therefore we booted up 3DMark 03 to first evaluate AA image quality in comparison to ATI’s X800 XT Platinum Edition with CATALYST 4.7:
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Notes
With NVIDIA’s new rotated-grid sampling pattern, the battle for AA quality has never been closer, and thus more subjective. We’ve found that superiority can depend on where you look, our test sample with 3DMark is a perfect example of this:
GeForce 6800 Ultra 4xAA
RADEON X800 XT Platinum Edition 4xAA
Looking at the area between the two engines, the jaggies on the leading edge of the B-17’s wing are less pronounced on the GeForce 6800 Ultra card than they are on the X800 XT. But, if you change your point of reference to the trailing B-17’s tail, the ATI card looks a little better:
GeForce 6800 Ultra 4xAA
RADEON X800 XT Platinum Edition 4xAA
Anisotropic filtering
Judging AF quality once mipmaps are disabled is just as difficult.
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Quite frankly, both cards are delivering excellent image quality, and while there has been lots of debate concerning the filtering optimizations both ATI and NVIDIA are employing in their drivers, we feel the bigger issue now is squashing IQ bugs in games. The texturing problems X800 users have had with the initial Far Cry 1.2 patch is well documented, but these little anomalies are present in dozens of games with both ATI and NVIDIA hardware. Fixing these bugs is in our opinion, the greatest IQ issue that exists between today’s high-end cards.
| Test systems | Page:: ( 4 / 21 ) |
System Setup
AMD Athlon 64 3800+
Gigabyte GA-K8NSNXP-939 nForce3 Ultra chipset
1GB Corsair XMS2 DDR2 SDRAM
ATI X800 XT Platinum Edition
Driver version CATALYST 4.7
Leadtek WinFast A400 Ultra TDH
NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra Reference board
NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GT Reference board
Driver version 61.77
250GB Maxtor Hard Drive Maxline III SATA Hard Drive w/16MB Cache
Windows XP Professional SP1
DirectX 9.0c
Benchmarks
Lock On: Modern Air Combat (Mig-29 custom demo)
Call of Duty (demo0032 custom demo)
Unreal Tournament 2004 (T3 custom demo)
IL-2 Sturmovik: Forgotten Battles (The Black Death track)
Splinter Cell (FS custom demo)
Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness (Beyond3D custom demo)
Halo: Combat Evolved (stock benchmark)
Far Cry 1.2 (custom demos for mp_jungle and research, SM2.0b and SM3.0 paths used)
| Call of Duty | Page:: ( 5 / 21 ) |
Call of Duty – OpenGL
| IL-2 Sturmovik: Forgotten Battles | Page:: ( 6 / 21 ) |
IL-2 Sturmovik: FB - OpenGL
| Lock On: Modern Air Combat | Page:: ( 7 / 21 ) |
Lock On: Modern Air Combat – Direct3D
| UT 2004 | Page:: ( 8 / 21 ) |
Unreal Tournament 2004
| Splinter Cell | Page:: ( 9 / 21 ) |
Splinter Cell – Direct3D
| Tomb Raider | Page:: ( 10 / 21 ) |
Tomb Raider – Direct3D
| Tomb Raider 4xAA | Page:: ( 11 / 21 ) |
Tomb Raider – Direct3D
| Halo | Page:: ( 12 / 21 ) |
Halo – Direct3D
| Far Cry Research | Page:: ( 13 / 21 ) |
Far Cry – Direct3D
| Far Cry Research 4xAA | Page:: ( 14 / 21 ) |
Far Cry - Direct3D
| Far Cry Research 4xAA/8xAF | Page:: ( 15 / 21 ) |
Far Cry – Direct3D
| Far Cry Jungle | Page:: ( 16 / 21 ) |
Far Cry – Direct3D
| Far Cry Jungle 4xAA | Page:: ( 17 / 21 ) |
Far Cry - Direct3D
| Far Cry Jungle 4xAA/8xAF | Page:: ( 18 / 21 ) |
Far Cry – Direct3D
| Overclocking | Page:: ( 19 / 21 ) |
Far Cry – Direct3D
Far Cry – Direct3D
| Ballistics Report | Page:: ( 20 / 21 ) |
Pros
Overclocked GeForce 6800 Ultra core: Leadtek overclocks the WinFast A400 Ultra TDH 25MHz by default, resulting in a final core clock speed of 425MHz, an improvement of 6% over stock. This allowed the WinFast A400 Ultra TDH to consistently finish ahead of the stock GeForce 6800 Ultra card, with the final result ranging from 2-6% depending on the application tested and the resolution and image quality settings used.
By overclocking the card from the factory, the WinFast A400 Ultra TDH should appeal to novices, or those who like the idea of having an overclocked card that’s backed by the factory warranty, ensuring peace of mind if something happens down the road. At the same time, enthusiasts looking for a little more performance can still overclock their board manually for even better performance.
Quieter fan: Leadtek’s Air Surround Cooling system runs quieter than the cooler found on other reference GeForce 6800 Ultra cards. Noise output was right around 28 decibels. While we don’t consider the regular 6800 Ultra cooler “loud”, if noise is a concern to you, you should definitely consider the WinFast A400 Ultra TDH.
Dual DVI: NVIDIA is configuring all their GeForce 6800 Ultra cards with dual DVI connections, a feature flat-panel monitor users have been wanting for years. Dual DVI provides a little more flexibility than the more traditional VGA/DVI combination, as you can power dual DVIs, dual VGAs, or one of each, while the VGA/DVI combination can’t run dual DVIs.
Game bundle: Leadtek provides a pretty solid game bundle with the WinFast A400 Ultra TDH. You’ve got full retail copies of Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow and Price of Persia: Sands of Time, two games that have been released within the past year. For added convenience (at least if you have a DVD drive) Leadtek actually ships Splinter Cell on DVD. Big Mutha Truckas and Gunmetal round out the game bundle.
Cons
No video-in: One feature we’ve noticed on the first crop of GeForce 6800 Ultra cards is the omission of video input support. This isn’t necessarily Leadtek’s fault, as we’ve seen this on multiple GeForce 6800 Ultra cards, but it’s disappointing to see NVIDIA take a step backward in this regard, especially now that ATI and its board partners are providing video-in on their X800 XT Platinum Edition cards.
Heat: While Leadtek’s cooler on the WinFast A400 Ultra TDH is quieter than NVIDIA’s reference cooler, we recorded higher core temperatures for the Leadtek card at idle and under load. This could probably be rectified if the card’s fan spun a little faster, but then it wouldn’t run as quietly as it does.
Temperatures were well below the thresholds NVIDIA has set for GeForce 6800 Ultra, so we’re pretty certain this won’t be a problem, but as always when dealing with a high-end graphics card, ensure that your case has good airflow.
| Final Verdict | Page:: ( 21 / 21 ) |
FiringSquad says:
Usually when a new GPU is released from NVIDIA, their board partners are locked in a race to be the first to market with cards at retail. As a result, corners are sometimes cut. Added extras such as the game bundle are often skipped, and while this used to be no big deal, today’s latest cards are actually shipping with modern games. In addition, first generation cards are usually based entirely off of NVIDIA’s reference design. This is because at the high-end, NVIDIA manufactures all the cards for their board partners.
Leadtek deviates from this formula with their WinFast A400 Ultra TDH. While the card itself is physically still a reference design, Leadtek has added their own copper cooler, dubbed Air Surround, to the mix. Air Surround runs quieter than the stock NVIDIA cooler, which is an important consideration for those of you who may be concerned about noise. Admittedly, the card does run a little hotter as a result though (This could probably be fixed if Leadtek took the ATI route and implemented a larger low-RPM cooling fan).
On the software side, Leadtek includes a nice bundle with the WinFast A400 Ultra TDH. Included in the box is a copy of Price of Persia: The Sands of Time, which was released last November, as well as the DVD version of Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow, a title which is only four months old. Both of these games are based on DX8 technology, so neither is a slouch in the graphics department, and they’ve both earned solid reviews from end users and the gaming press alike.
And while the GeForce 6800 Ultra is no slouch when it comes to performance, Leadtek has overclocked their WinFast A400 Ultra TDH for even more performance. Leadtek bumps the core clock frequency up to 425MHz; this is an improvement of 25MHz over the stock GeForce 6800 Ultra clock speed. We witnessed performance improvements of up to 6% over our stock GeForce 6800 Ultra reference card because of this change.
All this adds up to a high-end graphics card that packs a little more punch than your typical plain-jane first generation GeForce 6800 Ultra card, hence the WinFast A400 Ultra TDH earns our Bull’s Eye award. You pay the same $500 as everyone else, yet you get a little more performance, quieter cooler, and a good software bundle. In our eyes, this makes the WinFast A400 Ultra TDH a solid value among the first generation of GeForce 6800 Ultra cards.
Now if Leadtek can just get their board temperatures down a little, they’d have a definite Editor’s Choice contender. Perhaps this is what they have in mind for their second generation GeForce 6800 Ultra? We certainly hope so!