Nvidia took the gaming community by storm when they originally released the first GPU, the original GeForce. Here was a chipset that ran at a measly 120 MHz...
One of the very first things we noticed when we fired this puppy up with our Athlon VIA KX-133 based test system, was its inability to run at AGP 4X. No matter what we did, we couldn't completely boot into Windows using AGP 4X. When we dropped down to AGP 2X, we had absolutely no problems. Now, this is not necessarily LeadTek's fault. We've had similar problems with our ELSA Gladiac GF2 video card when we attempted to run it at AGP 4X.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that there seems to be some kind of incompatibility issue between the VIA chipsets and the GeForce 2 chipset at AGP 4X mode. As a matter of fact, when we contacted ELSA about their GeForce 2 solution, we were told just that. We don't know of any fix as of the time of this publication. Our test system is outfitted with the latest VIA AGP drivers, which can be downloaded here
Bundled Software Windows Display Software
Our WinFast GF2 came standard with version 5.16 of the NVidia reference drivers. LeadTek included their own proprietary windows display software.
If you take a look to the left at the picture, you'll be able to see what the LeadTek display software look like. Pretty similar to the standard NVidia software but with LeadTek's logo. There were a couple of extra features, most notably SpeedRunner. SpeedRunner is LeadTek's own video card overclocking utility. We'll get more detail with SpeedRunner in the overclocking section.
WinFast DVD
Since the GeForce 2 chipset supports hardware DVD acceleration, it's always nice to have some software that takes advantage of it. Unfortunately, the WinFast DVD player doesn't take advantage of the card's hardware DVD acceleration in any way whatsoever. It's merely a software DVD player and it relies on your system's overall performance to display movies at a reasonable frame rate. Our Athlon 733 MHz test system played back DVD movies with absolutely no problems at all. LeadTek's inclusion of this software is definitely a plus. The software looks really cool, although there's nothing spectacular about it functionality wise. It just performs a simple function.
Overclocking
As we
mentioned earlier, our LeadTek GF2 video card was outfitted with a large quality
heatsink, and it was also outfitted with high quality 6ns Infineon DDR
SGRAM. We used LeadTek's SpeedRunner utility to overclock our card. Utilizing
the SpeedRunner utility we were able to overclock our unit from the default 200
MHz to 225 MHz core from the default 166 MHz to 187 MHz (effective 375 MHz)
memory clock. Those were the only two speeds we were able to achieve stable. Any
higher speeds resulted in the computer crashing when we tried to put any
pressure on the video subsystem. Not very impressive, but nevertheless,
overclockable.
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