Introduction

Gainward Co., Ltd, a leading manufacturer of high performance 3D graphics cards and home entertainment accelerators, announces the world's fastest and most powerful 128MB 3D graphics accelerator, the Gainward GeForce4 PowerPack! Ultra/750 XP "Golden Sample” TM. The Gainward GeForce4 PowerPack! Ultra/750 XP "Golden Sample” TM graphics card offers a complete and advanced feature-set of today's most powerful 3D technology. Featuring Gainward's High-Performance/Wide-BandwidthTM hardware design specially developed to take utmost advantage of 128 MB of Ultra-DDR display memory, the Gainward GeForce4 PowerPack! Ultra/750 XP "Golden Sample” TM is potentially the highest performing 3D graphics board ever built in mass production.

Installation

The installation went smoothly with this card. My initial worry was that the size of the case would restrict me putting in the card because I had heard that the GeForce 4 card was much larger than the Geforce 2 predecessor. After taking the old card out and a bit of moving of cables the Geforce 4 card slipped into the slot with about 0.5 of a cm away from the hard drive. One of the main differences that you notice about the GeForce 4 card vs. the older GeForce 2 card is the fact there is a big heatsink and fan on the card vs. the much smaller one on the Geforce 2.

After installing the card the other thing that you notice is the number of connections. There are 2 connections on the back of the Gainward card which bring back memories of the 3dfx Voodoo 2 card where you had a separate 3d accelerator and a separate 2d card. The 2 slots at the back of the card are where you can hook up 2 monitors and use nView. The card has support for VGA+VGA, VGA+DVI, VGA+TV-out, DVI+TV-out, and DVI+DVI. The nView Display Technology allows you to select any combination of multiple displays, including digital flat panels, analog CRTs, and TVs. Luckily in the pack there is adaptors for both the slots you can connect your standard monitor 9 pin connections to it.

After installing the card I loaded up windows and the first thing you notice is that it seems a bit darker than usual. I am guessing that it is due to the fact that the connection is running through the adaptor at the back. After Windows XP found the new hardware I slotted in the Gainward PowerCD that came with the package and installed all the software on the CD. One of the main things that it installs is called EXPERTool for Windows. I will talk more about EXPERTool later in the review, but in general it is an icon that sits down by your clock and you can tinker with the clock settings (Memory and Core), the refresh rate, and resolution.

All in all the installation of the card was a breeze and any worries I had about the size of the card or the running of the card were dispelled.