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The Geforce2 Ultra that I got to play with was made by VisionTek. If you haven’t heard of VisionTek it’s probably because they are known more for their memory production rather than for their video cards. They also tend to stick more to the less glamorous OEM market, which many people know little about.

The VisionTek Geforce2 Ultra design is, for the most part, the same as the NVIDIA reference design. The major difference is the larger heatsink/fan combo that is 2x2 inches as opposed to 1.5x1.5 inches. This should keep the card stable after long hours of intense gaming action. Some people have had problems with the heatsinks on their VisionTek boards not fully contacting the surface of the memory chips and GPU, leaving a small gap of air in between. The heatsinks on the board they sent us, however, appear to be installed just fine.

Angled & Vertical Shots of the Visiontek Geforce 2 Ultra

Here are some more specs for you to ogle at:

The Specs

256-bit quad-pipe graphics architecture [250MHz]
64Mb 4ns SDRAM DDR Memory [230MHz]
2 Gigatexels/s and 1 Gigapixel/s
31 Million Polygons/s
2nd-generation T&L engines
AGP 4X/2X with Fast Writes
32-bit color and Z/Stencil buffer
Cube Environment Mapping
Single pass multi-texturing
Advanced per-pixel, perspective-correct texturing
Order Independent Full Scene Multisampling Antialiasing (FSAA)
OpenGL 1.2 support for Linux
Multi-buffering (double, triple, quad buffering) for smooth animation and video playback VGA, DVI-I, TV-Out connectors

Installation

The OEM version of the Geforce2 Ultra that VisionTek sent us came with a drivers CD as well as WinDVD 2000. The drivers they provide are the NVIDIA Detonator 2 drivers (v5.32) which don’t fully support the Ultra, so I had to download the Detonator 3 drivers (v6.31), which do fully support the Ultra, myself.

The manual is pretty basic and the driver documentation that it contains was been written for the older Detonator 2 drivers, so some of the newer Detonator 3 features are not documented. For those who aren’t "in the know" this could cause some confusion.

Installing the VisionTek Geforce2 Ultra is a simple matter of inserting the card and installing the drivers. The only twist (albeit a minor one) is removing the drivers for your previous video card before you install the new ones. The best way to do this is to boot up into Safe Mode, go to the device settings in the control panel, and remove everything under the heading “Display Adapters” (unless you have more than one video card installed, in which case you should leave that one installed).