Battle of the Titans 2: Creative Labs’s Annihilator 2 vs. Absolute Multimedia’s Outrageous GeForce2 GTS – THG.RU

Introduction

A few months have whizzed by since the initial release of NVIDIA’s flagship chip, the GeForce2 GTS (or GF2), and the various brands of GF2 have flooded their ways into the market since our initial GF2 round up. The barrage of choices that consumers are hit with can be very intimidating when looking to buy a GF2.

To simplify things for you, we’ve gathered the analysis from our previous reviews and combined them together while adding another two boards to the fray. We’ll take a peek at the up to date costs, features, performance and availability. You’ll obviously get the scoop on the “extras” like overclockability, BX compatibility and driver functionality of each contender that you won’t usually find window-shopping. With that being said, let’s begin the review.

New Contenders – Absolute Multimedia GeForce2 GTS

The first of our two newly added contestants is the GF2 from Absolute Multimedia (AMM). You’ll quickly notice that this bad boy has heat sinks on the front and back to compensate for the added heat generated in overclocked conditions. Although this may seem to be a great idea, we’ve seen that heat isn’t necessarily the issue (as observed in the Prophet II review) when it comes to squeezing the last drop of performance from the memory. It can’t hurt to have the added cooling but the limitation of the AMM GF2’s 6ns memory is the biggest problem here. The best choice to solve this issue would be to use faster memory but that would equate to a huge cost trade-off that most people won’t probably care for.

As far as cooling the core, a decent solution is used (similar to that found on the Asus AGP-V7700) to keep the 200MHz core speed under control. As we’ve seen in Tom’s exploration into overclocking the Gainward CARDExpert GeForce2 at extreme levels, the 200MHz GF2 core speed is just fine but is rather limited by the inadequate memory performance at 333MHz. It won’t hurt to have a decent cooling solution to keep things stable however, so there isn’t anything to complain about here.

The AMM GF2 box stays pretty basic as it ships with its simple instructions, driver, demo software and Soft DVD player (Intervideo). It also comes with the “Software-Choice” package that allows you to send away for free software. The number you can choose from depends on the titles you’re interested in. I’m not a very big fan of any type of bundled game software but this type of offering is probably the most appealing since up-to-date titles are among the choices.

There was one very odd thing I discovered during my driver install that I felt was counter intuitive. AMM decided to make a video to help users during the install but what I think they failed to realize is that most people install their board then go onward to reading CD documentation. By the time someone swaps cards, they’ll end up being unable to watch a video in basic VGA mode. Most users attempting this install won’t need the video but if they did, they just might end up in a rut during the install because of this. My vote would be for better paper documentation like that found in the Asus, Creative and Leadtek offerings.

After the release of previous AMM reviews many readers had problems tracking down shops in the US that carried these products but that shouldn’t be an issue by the time their GF2 begin shipping as they plan to have product in popular stores within the next few weeks as well as on their website.

New Contenders – Creative Labs Annihilator 2

When the GF2 initially made its way onto shelves, I was a bit shocked that Creative wasn’t one of the first companies to release their product like we’ve come to expect. The board did eventually make its way out however, and although I didn’t notice any huge design changes, it was released at a very aggressive price.

The board itself follows the reference design for the most part and looks very similar to the Annihilator Pro. The board is equipped with 6ns memory and is clocked at the standard core and memory reference speeds.

The package comes with above average installation material, Creative Blaster Control drivers, a few visual enhancement utilities, NVIDIA demos, and some other minor applications. The setup is very basic but the basics were there are I’m sure the novices out there would appreciated the printed installation manuals provided with the board.

Contestant Overview

I’ve recompiled our comparison table to reflect all our reviewed boards.

Keep in mind that the street prices of each product can vary from area to area and also may change by the time of publication.

Drivers – Absolute Multimedia GeForce2 GTS

The AMM GF2 drivers are repackaged reference drivers so we won’t bother wasting our time showing you the basic set of windows. For many of you this is not such a big deal being that you’ll probably load the reference drivers anyhow. If you’re a big fan of custom driver software, the only thing AMM is offering over reference is the ability to overclock without having to load special registry entries to get to the “cool bits” options.

Drivers – Creative Labs Annihilator 2

Here we have the main driver interface screen. From here we can see all the installed graphics adapters and driver information. You can also reach the other various options from here.

The Creative driver provides hardware diagnostics.

The Creative driver interface does a pretty thorough job of software diagnosing the machine’s software setup.

Adjustments for the monitor settings can all be found here.

Drivers – Creative Labs Annihilator 2, Continued

The driver interface provides yet more details software information for each API.

Creative provides a “tweak” utility with their product to let you make your performance fine tuning adjustments. You’re not only able to adjust clock speeds but AGP options as well.

Drivers – Creative Labs Annihilator 2, Continued

Here you have your fill of D3D options. You notice that the FSAA options aren’t available.

Drivers – Creative Labs Annihilator 2, Continued

The driver interface contains most of the usual options with the exception of FSAA.

Visual adjustments for video output are adjusted here.

Although the Creative driver didn’t have the FSAA options available in any of the API’s, I was pretty pleased with what they did with the driver. It might not be much more than what the competition is offering, but it was a very comfortable interface to use. The tweak and diagnostic windows were quick and easy to navigate through when making my adjustments. Overall I would have to say they’ve created one of the better driver interfaces period.

Drivers – Others

Here are the links to the other competing boards’ drivers.

• AOpen PA256 Pro
• Asus AGP-V7700 Pure
• ELSA Gladiac
• Gainward CARDExpert GF2 GTS
• Guillemot 3D Prophet II GTS
• Leadtek WFGF2

Benchmark Setup

I decided to use the latest driver available for each of our GF2 boards that happened to be based on NVIDIA’s 5.32 drivers and supposedly have improved FSAA performance.

Due to popular demand I also added results for NVIDIA TNT Ultra and 3dfx VD3 3000 boards. It seems many people want to see how much better a GeForce2 based board would be over their aging 3D board.

Benchmark Expectations

I don’t expect our two GF2 boards to vary much in performance as they’re both using the same driver base. There also should be no competition between the GF2’s and the older video cards. If you’re curious to see how well the GF2 chipset does in general, please read Tom’s Take on NVIDIA’s GeForce2 GTS. Keep in mind that clock speed differences or driver variations may show differences in performance but other than that, we should expect these boards to produce numbers within a few percent of each other.

Benchmark Results – Quake 3 Arena Demo001

Our GeForce2 contenders are side by side at all resolutions. When switching to high resolution or high color, the older 3D cards obviously aren’t very good performers. If you value those settings, its probably time to make the move to a much faster card.

Benchmark Results – Quake 3 Arena NV15Demo

Our lightning fast GPUs don’t get to shine much as Quake 3 isn’t a very efficient T&L software title. You’ll notice that when fill-rate isn’t an issue, the CPU powered T&L of the TNT2 and VD3 don’t do too badly when compared with the two powerhouses.

Benchmark Results – Expendable Demo

Keeping right where we expect them to be, the two GF2 contestants are still right on top of one another. Even in a benchmark that’s relatively easy, the older 3D cards drop off greatly at the 1024 resolution even in 16-bit color.

Benchmark Results – FSAA

There’s nothing new here as both boards are dead on. However, when I compared my older scores with the newer ones, I didn’t see any improvements from using the newer drivers in FSAA modes. Obviously neither of the older boards officially supports FSAA.

Overclocking

I was slightly disappointed to have my AMM GF2 only achieve what my Creative Labs Annihilator board could do when it came to overclocking. Both were only able to reach some 380MHz memory clock speed. This is about average,but the performance gains from upping the memory speed are well worth the trouble. The AMM GF2 was able to actually not freeze at a higher speed but the video was somewhat corrupt from being overclocked. To me that’s not acceptable so I didn’t count those tests as passed.

AMM had good intensions by placing such cooling solutions on their GF2 solution but its very unfortunate that it isn’t able to buy them anything.

Overclocked BX Support

Both competitors were tested for an extended period on an MSI BX Master motherboard running at the out-of-spec AGP speed without any hitches. Quake 3 Arena Demo’s played flawlessly for about an hour each with absolutely no video corruption. For those who don’t plan to switch to a Solano platform anytime soon, it looks like you’ve be safe using either board on your overclocked BX monster.

Conclusion

With such a variety of GeForce2 based boards now, I felt that I actually had three categories to pick winners for. Top 3D performer, best 3D/Video solution combination and most “bang for your buck” are the categories I decided on.

Our first winner was a very easy choice for top dog performer. If price is not an issue and you want the fastest 3D possible, the Gainward CARDExpert GF2 GTS is the card to get. Equipped with the fastest memory possible (5ns DDR SGRAM) it was able to achieve speeds that are matched by no other GF2 and dominated the performance charts, hands down. Opening up the memory bottleneck was a tremendous boost that allowed it to topple the best boards around.

Next came the ELSA Gladiac as our Video solution winner. The optional video in/out module is inexpensive enough to match or beat any of the other competitors prices and to top it off, ELSA provides you with some excellent software when you pick up the video upgrade module. Toss in the ability to add 3D Revelator goggles and ELSA easily takes home the crown for this category.

Lastly (but not least), we have the Leadtek WFGF2 as our “bang for your buck” winner. Available for $289 it sells as cheap as the Creative Labs offering, but sports the video-out option that the Creative lacks. The Annihilator 2 does have a slightly better driver interface and the ability to run Glide games through the Creative Unified driver but I didn’t feel it was enough to counter the video-out option, as Glide support isn’t such a big deal anymore for most users.