Ga-GF2000 GeForce2 GTS 32MB AGP
Is High performance available for anyone ?

Manufacturer - Gigabyte
Friday, August 18, 2000 - Hilbert Hagedoorn

Today we will be looking at another GeForce 2 GTS based videocard. This time it'll be the latest one from Gigabyte. As I mentioned in other reviews before, Gigabyte is one of my personal favorite manufacturers. They have a strong and solid research and development team and produce high quality and steady product at an affordable price. Besides that, their videocards always have had a good reputation in terms of tweaking. They always have included some sort of cooling hack on their videocards which sets their products far aside from other manufacturers.

While looking closely at the GA-GF2000 Geforce2 GTS (GF2 from now on) we can see that it is a very close resemblance of the reference design GeForce2 GTS from NVIDIA. The card is equipped with 32 MB DDR (Double Datarate) 6NS SGRAM from Infineon. There is no TV/S-VHS Output available on this videocard, however it is an optional buy, so there are some cards out there with TV-Outputwich allow you to output to the big screen. This GF2 comes in a Gigabytes house design box and includes of course the cool blue (Gigabyte's Signature) videocard, a detailed manual, a driver CD with the basics. 

The GF2 is now actually equipped with a HDTV processor, a new standard that is introduced in the US at this time. The HDTV processor can be connected to a HDTV decoder. Now we should be able to watch Full-screen HD television. Unfortunately in Europe this new standard is not introduced yet, so it will not play a big role on this side off the world.  The GF2 is an excellent card to show off and view DVD movies. It can decode in hardware MPEG streams in HQ and of course realtime. Luckily PowerDVD 2000 (trial) is included in the software bundle, that's better than nothing, huh Creative ?

Coming up: the videocard review continued

Copyright 1999 - All rights reserved Hilbert Hagedoorn