GA-660 TNT2 Videocard
GIGA-BYTE TECHNOLOGY CO., LTD. 
Chinese: www.gigabyte.com.tw
German : www.gigabyte.de
US : www.giga-byte.com
Thursday, August 19, 1999
Hilbert Hagedoorn
Hardware used
Pentium II 350Mhz 100Mhz Bus
128Mb PC 100 SDRam
Software used
Windows 98 build 4.10.x
DirectX 6.x
Latest nVIDIA Detonator drivers 1.88
General
GA-660 TNT2 is based upon nVIDIA's Riva TNT2 chipset. And has 32 Megabyte DRam onboard.
Package is bundled with a driver CD and manual.
The Review
Not too long ago we have tested the GA-630 (3dfx Banshee) from Gigabyte. Believe it or
not that was only 6 months ago. I once told you guys that in the future we should see a
new generation of 3D chips every 6 months, there you have it. Its now six months later and
we are reviewing cards like Voodoo3, TNT2 and Savage4. After the STB merger Gigabyte did
not have any oppertinity to make Voodoo3 based cards and therefor had to go with the
followup succesor in the 3D bizz nVIDIA. Their TNT2 crunchy chip is a strong competitor
towards Voodoo3 and most surely has everything in it what we consumers now-a-days need.
May i present to you the GA-660,
The GA-660 is a graphics accelerator
powered by nVIDIA's second generation RIVA TNT2 processor, it deliveres unsurpassed 3D
quality and 2D/3D performance at an attractive price.
The GA-660 (660 from now on) comes in three flavours:
- GA-660 - 32MB with
standard monitor output
- GA-660F - 32Mb with support for both
standard monitors and digital flat panels
- GA-660FT- 32MB with standard monitors,
digital flat panels and TV-Out support
Included in the box, are one GA-660
videocard, a driver CD and a manual. The driver CD includes the latest drivers (that must
have been the lamest notice that i have been written ever), and some software like:
- CyberLink CDWizard'98
- Trend PC-cillin 98 OEM Setup Ver.4.02 (Anti Virus)
- HighPoint Xstore Pro Bus Master IDE Driver for Win95/98
(dunno what this is doin' there)
- Adobe Acrobat Reader Ver.3.01
- Final Reality Benchmark Ver.1.01
- GA-660 Video Bios Flash Utility
With a 156.5 Mhz clocked, 32MB DRAM, 300Mhz RAMDAC equiped
GA-660 TNT2 you'll get about 300 Mega freaking pixel per second fillrate, 9M million
triangles/sec peak, massive 2.9GB/sec frame buffer bandwidth, and with excellent 3D Game
features like 32 bit rendering, 32 bit Z-buffer, 8 bit stencil buffer, anisotropic
filtering, bump mapping, it includes a VCD software player(Cyberlink CD Wizard).
With AGP 2x/4x interface, full sideband support, AGP
texturing, GA-660 TNT2 can have a wide range of applications from the hottest 3D games to
full screen, 30fps DVD playback.
The TNT2 is manufacturered with a
0.25 micron manufacturering process. it currently produces 125-150 MHz chips. The GA-660
is clocked at a 156.5 Memory and 156.5 core clock.
Compared to TNT (1) the TNT2 is ofcourse a hell-of-a-lot faster, but also carries AGP4x
support which will become available later this year (probably summer/fall '99). Another
great new feature on the TNT2 based cards is the ability to do hardware motion
compensation. This feature will reduce CPU utilization bigtime while playing MPG/DVD
(MPEG-2) multimedia files. Other major advantages are full 32Bit 3D gaming support and
ofcourse a texture mapping size of 2048x2048.
Furthermore a very detailed, efficient and well writtten manual was included to get even
the lame a TNT2 card installed with ease. What i like about this manual is that EVERYTHING
get described, hardware installation, software installation and even all display
properties. Not a lot of companies do this anymore. Thumbs up Gigabyte !
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