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| Page 3 of 7 |
Physical
The card looks like a miniature of ABIT's well known motherbords - copper coloured, complete with AWARD BIOS chip.
The review board was rev 0.11 PCB.
The card is completely based on the reference design. Build quality is good - rigid PCB, tightly secured backplate, decent heatsink/fan. Talking about cooling here are some pictures:
The cooling solution is a low profile heatsink with a low profile fan mounted on top - as opposed to the integrated fan heatsink solution used in the Creative GeForce card (you can catch Wymun's take on the Creative card here). This provides more surface area in the path of airflow, which means better cooling. We will have a look at what this does for overclocking a little later.
On both sides of the PCB is the ubiquitous ESMT 5ns SDRAM.
Technically, this is rated for 200MHz operation, although ABIT had it clocked at the Nvidia recommended default 166MHz. If you have seen Wymun's review of the Creative GeForce card, you would have noticed that this both cards use the same SDRAM (down to the same part number). However, this ABIT card overclocks much better - again, more of that later.
AGP4x connectors - and yes, the card checks out to be AGP4x compliant.
This Powerstrip diagnostic shows the card to be AGP4x/FastWrites capable (it is not enabled due to the BX test bench used, more of that later).
The ABIT Siluro GT256 comes with TV-out as well as Digital Flat Panel connections as mentioned earlier.
TV Output
TV output facility is provided by the following Rockwell Bt868 video encoder.
TV output is above average - but understand that this is no Marvel G400TV. Output format is limited to 640x480 for NTSC, and up to 800x600 for PAL.
Digital Flat Panel Output
This Silicon Image SIL154 transmitter provides Digital Flat Panel support for the ABIT Siluro GF256.
Unfortunately, I do not have a flat panel to test (*hint hint*) the quality of this support. According to the datasheet, the SIL154 supports display size ranging from 640x480@25MHz to 1280x1024@112MHz. It supports 12 bit (1/2 pixel) or 24-bit 1 pixel/clock input for true colour (16.7 million) support. Digital flat panel interface is suppose to provide for higher signal tolerance compared with analogue interface, thus clearer image. The datasheet boasts of sufficient signal tolerance to support cable lengths of up to 5 metres!
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