A word about Overclocking

I know for some of you the urge to overclock this card is going to be great but I have a few comments about this before you do it. Firstly the current drivers only allow you to clock the memory chips not the core itself. You can overclock the core by downloading powerstrip from Entech. One word of caution though. The GeForce contains over 23 million transistors making it more complex than the PIII chip thus it runs fairly hot at its default speed of 120 MHz. I've never seen anybody on the web able to achieve over 130 MHz with this chip without some fairly outrageous cooling methods so your chances of success are limited at best. On top of this most CPU's have enough trouble trying to keep this chip busy so overclocking wont give you much of an increase with a CPU under 600 MHz. My recommendation is to wait until we start seeing some real increases in speed due to overclocking until then all it is doing is adding unneeded heat into your system.

Conclusion

Pros	Cons
Faster than anything currently out there	Expensive!
32-Bit excellence has finally been achieved
	No TV out
T&L engine gives it some extra life	Not an overclocker just yet
DDR memory gives you astronomical bandwidth	Your friends will bother you to death to borrow it!
Rating	9 out of 10

I have to say in all my years of testing hardware this card has impressed me more than pretty much anything else. It gives anyone today with a fairly decent system an instant performance boost in every game across the board. On top of this it includes the next generation in graphics technology T&L so when the games of the future do indeed come out you'll be able to play them as they were intended. So this brings me to the question you all probably have been asking yourselves: Should I buy it? If you have the cash ($300) this card wont disappoint and I would definitely purchase it. However if the thought of spending more on your graphics card than your cpu makes you wince consider waiting until the entire landscape forms. Remember 3DFX, Matrox and ATI have yet to demonstrate their next generation cards in shipping form so there could be some surprises around the corner. Also nVidia is on the verge of completing their NV15 the successor to the GeForce so expect a lot from them in the next release. Please remember though that no matter what you purchase its going to be obsolete in 6 months that's just the nature of this industry. One day we'll all have multi GHz media processors that integrate all this onto a single chip that costs 30 bucks but until then we have to deal with the pace of innovation.  Bottom line the GeForce is one tuff card to beat, the only thing that comes anywhere close is S3's new Savage 2000 but I'll leave that to Rizen to sort out. Until then thanks for having me here and I hope to return soon.

Mark Costigliola
Contributing Reviewer, Rizenet

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