Yesterday I got home from a rough day at the office to find a pleasant surprise, my Geforce3 had shipped from buy.com and was waiting for me on the doorstep!
The card appears to be identical to the Visiontek (no surprise since it is made by them under contract from Elsa) but it comes with the Giants game that is optimized for the GF3 as well as a translucent mousemat that says "Elsa Gladiac" on it (I have a ratpad so the mousemat is useless to me).
The card installed easily, I loaded up the 12.41 Detonators rather than using Elsa's own special flavor of drivers. I also loaded NVTweak but I wasn't able to overclock the card. I tried to load 12.60 and overclock but still a no go. My 3dmark2001 scores didn't change a bit even when NV Tweak said the card was overclocked. I also had probs with the 12.60 drivers where I was unable to manually turn on FSAA options.. so in the end I reverted to the 12.41 drivers and still don't know why I can't overclock.
I got 5330 on 3DMark2001 for those that are very benchmark driven (nothing overclocked, see my system specs below).
2D on the card is definitely better than other Geforce cards I have owned. My previous card was an Elsa Geforce2 GTS, which was above average for a Geforce in 2D, but the GF3 is MUCH better. I am now able to run 1280X1024 on my Sony 19" monitor and get razor sharp text (I had a little ghosting and fuzziness on my GF2 even at 85 hz).
Also color saturation is markedly improved in both 2d and 3d.
In Counter Strike de_nuke I immediately noticed dramatic improvements on the color. All the buildings colors were extremely vibrant. This was something I noticed almost immediately upon joining the game... the color was so rich it made my old card feel "washed out" by comparison.
With Quintex AA turned on I was able to run Cstrike at 1280X768 and still get framerates averaging over 70 fps and the picture was gorgeous, you'd have a hard time saying the game engine is 3 years old.
Giants ran perfectly up to 1600X1200 with solid framerates. The enhancements look nice, with things like bump-mapping on the ocean, and flare effects and shading added.
This weekend I plan to load up some more favorites such as MW4 which would drive my 32 meg GF2 to it's knees with details turned on at 1024X768.
When I initially bought the board I was a little hesitant since I realized that there weren't many titles out there to take advantage of the technology.
I was completely wrong. ALL titles will take advantage of the quality of this card. The image quality, color quality and sharpness improvements alone make it worth the upgrade. Plus the ability to run older games with Quintex AA at max resolutions breathes old life into old favorites. Not to mention that there are plenty of new games coming out in the next 3-6 months which will immediately run perfectly on the card at high resolutions with all details maxed.
All in all, an excellent purchase!
BTW, I got the card for $331 shipped... when you take into account it included a $50 game the card basically cost about $280 (I was planning on picking up Giants anyway).
The card appears to be identical to the Visiontek (no surprise since it is made by them under contract from Elsa) but it comes with the Giants game that is optimized for the GF3 as well as a translucent mousemat that says "Elsa Gladiac" on it (I have a ratpad so the mousemat is useless to me).
The card installed easily, I loaded up the 12.41 Detonators rather than using Elsa's own special flavor of drivers. I also loaded NVTweak but I wasn't able to overclock the card. I tried to load 12.60 and overclock but still a no go. My 3dmark2001 scores didn't change a bit even when NV Tweak said the card was overclocked. I also had probs with the 12.60 drivers where I was unable to manually turn on FSAA options.. so in the end I reverted to the 12.41 drivers and still don't know why I can't overclock.
I got 5330 on 3DMark2001 for those that are very benchmark driven (nothing overclocked, see my system specs below).
2D on the card is definitely better than other Geforce cards I have owned. My previous card was an Elsa Geforce2 GTS, which was above average for a Geforce in 2D, but the GF3 is MUCH better. I am now able to run 1280X1024 on my Sony 19" monitor and get razor sharp text (I had a little ghosting and fuzziness on my GF2 even at 85 hz).
Also color saturation is markedly improved in both 2d and 3d.
In Counter Strike de_nuke I immediately noticed dramatic improvements on the color. All the buildings colors were extremely vibrant. This was something I noticed almost immediately upon joining the game... the color was so rich it made my old card feel "washed out" by comparison.
With Quintex AA turned on I was able to run Cstrike at 1280X768 and still get framerates averaging over 70 fps and the picture was gorgeous, you'd have a hard time saying the game engine is 3 years old.
Giants ran perfectly up to 1600X1200 with solid framerates. The enhancements look nice, with things like bump-mapping on the ocean, and flare effects and shading added.
This weekend I plan to load up some more favorites such as MW4 which would drive my 32 meg GF2 to it's knees with details turned on at 1024X768.
When I initially bought the board I was a little hesitant since I realized that there weren't many titles out there to take advantage of the technology.
I was completely wrong. ALL titles will take advantage of the quality of this card. The image quality, color quality and sharpness improvements alone make it worth the upgrade. Plus the ability to run older games with Quintex AA at max resolutions breathes old life into old favorites. Not to mention that there are plenty of new games coming out in the next 3-6 months which will immediately run perfectly on the card at high resolutions with all details maxed.
All in all, an excellent purchase!
BTW, I got the card for $331 shipped... when you take into account it included a $50 game the card basically cost about $280 (I was planning on picking up Giants anyway).
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