Introduction
It's been almost three months since we first brought you the review of NVIDIA's newest chipset, the . From the first review we had of this chipset, we've known there was a huge issue in regards to available memory bandwidth with the SDR GeForce board Proof was provided through extensive testing and comparison between the SDR and DDR reference boards and not just theoretical number crunching. To be honest, the DDR GeForce 256 performance is what we expected from the GeForce product line in the first place. Having the fastest pixel fill-rate in the world isn't going to help you if your performance is bottlenecked by mediocre memory performance. With the arrival of our first released DDR GeForce 256 board, the Leadtek GeForce 256 DDR, we are now able to show you just what you've been missing out on.
The Company
Leadtek has been a dependable company based in Taiwan that manufactures graphics cards, LAN cards, modems, motherboards, and videoconference systems. We've come to expect a solid board from them as well as slightly more expensive designs and/or components for their slightly higher pricing. They do however try keeping the philosophy of shipping a high performance, feature rich board and not worrying too much about what software to bundle. Another interesting note is that Leadtek is known for a strong customer support. If you haven't noticed, Leadtek continues to sell 3DLabs graphics cards (called the "L series") although 3DLabs currently is selling direct. How can they do this? Certain large OEMs prefer the board layout and technical support provided by Leadtek. I'm not saying that 3DLabs isn't a competent company but rather that Leadtek must offer some damn good work if OEMs are willing to dish out a few extra dollars on a large scale to have Leadtek's product over 3DLabs.
