Date: June 7th, 2003
Article by: Roger (Hardware Reviewer)
Edited by: Nathan Glentworth (Owner, Head Editor)
Product was donated by: Chaintech America
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PRODUCT COMPOSITION

As I said earlier, the package does not contain a lot of extras. There is the card, the instruction manual, the driver/application CD and a 120cm S-Video cable.

The CD has contains:

- Drivers
- WinDVD 4(Optional)
- WinDVD Creator(Optional)
- WinRip(Optional)
- Adobe Photoshop Album

And of course, here is the card. We'll cover it in detail in the following section.

PRODUCT WALKTHROUGH & PICTORIAL

First thing you'll notice is the great blue PCB that is used for this card. I've always like this color and think it looks great in a clear or windowed case. The heatsink/fan combo is secured by two push-pins, with thermal paste between it and the GPU. The core's engine clock operates at 270MHz. The FX chip supports NVIDIA's CineFX 2.0 Engine as well as High-Precision Graphics and DirectX 9.0.

For those who aren't familiar with CineFX, here's the official NVIDIA write-up;

"As special effects in the latest Hollywood blockbuster films continue to advance at an incredible rate, you've come to expect amazingly realistic explosions, true-to-life ocean waves in a sea storm, and incredibly vivid colors in animated features. So there's no reason you should settle for anything less than the best when it comes to your games. Architected for high-level programming languages like Cg, the NVIDIA® GeForce FX GPU's first- and second-generation NVIDIA® CineFX engines produce gaming effects on par with the hottest motion pictures. Combined with 128-bit studio-quality color processing technology, 3D worlds and characters are more real than anything that's come before. Hollywood dreams are now a desktop reality."

This card also supports Studio-Quality Precision Color and Vertex and Pixel Shaders.

Here is a closer, side shot of the HSF. The blades are clear, but there is no LED to illuminate it. This is no doubt a cost-saving measure. You can see the push-pins which hold the HSF securely in place.