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INTRODUCTION

To meet the demanding requirements of today video games, you need a video card that can take the heat when things get tough. Inno3D has produced their version of nVidia’s GeForce3 much to gamers delight. This “bad boy” card has all the power to take-on today’s games and more.

Gamer’s concern is about frame rate. It just sucks to have a friend frag you in a multi-player first shooter because the lags from your GPU made you react slower. So when testing video cards, most gamers are not interested in image quality, since, you are not really going to notice a missing pixel because the frames are flashing to fast for you to notice, instead the primary factor is processing power and speed. While frame rate is king in games, it is also nice to have extra features that you can use when you are not gaming.

Since this is a GeForce card, I am going to pit it against its fellow nVidia GeForce brothers. First, let's look at the features of the Inno3D “TORNADO”.

FEATURE HIGHLIGHTS

• Third Generation nVIDIA GeForce3 nFiniteFX GPU
• nFiniteFX programmable Vertex Shader
• nFiniteFX programmable Pixel Shader
• Lightspeed Memory Architecture
• High-Resolution Antialiasing (HRAA)
• 3.2 billion AA samples per sec fill rate
• 7.36GB/sec memory bandwidth
• World's Fastest DDR Memory interface
• Second Generation integrated T&L Engines
• 350MHz RAMDAC
• High Definition Video Processor (HDVP)
• AGP 4X/2X w/ AGP texturing and Fast Writes support
• 64MB Ultra fast DDR SDRAM on board
• Optional TV output module
• ATX form factor board

The first thing you notice on this card is that the heatsink and fan are blue. Personally, I think this colour is excellent and definitely better than the green or black commonly used by other manufacturers.

The next thing you’ll notice is the nice blue orb fan that has been employed to keep things cool. This is another excellent choice, as the blue orb is known to be the choice of overclockers in keeping GPU longevity when overclocking.

Installation was easy and the card actually comes with nVidia detonator v21.81 drivers. However, I opted for the newer v21.83 drivers. Without further delays, let view the test system and get on with the benchmarking.

Let’s quickly look at the test system:

THE COMPETITION:

• Visiontek GeForce2 Ultra 64MB DDR
• Inno3D GeForce3 64MB DDR
• OCZ GeForce3 64MB DDR
• ATI Radeon VE 32MB

Inno3D’s “TORNADO” is facing his nVidia brethren, as well as a rival ATI Radeon card. The GeForce series is the known speed king of video cards, so let’s see how the “TORNADO” will live up to that standard.