Tom's Hardware > All Reviews > Components > Graphics Cards > The Magnificent Seven: GeForce3 Board Round-up

The Magnificent Seven: GeForce3 Board Round-up

1:05 PM - July 9, 2001 by Uwe Scheffel

1. Introduction
2. GeForce3 Up Close & Personal
3. The Boards In Brief
4. Asus V8200 Deluxe
5. Asus V8200 Deluxe, Continued
6. Video Encoder And Decoder In One Chip
7. Drivers
8. Drivers, Continued
9. Asus Taskbar
10. Video Recorder
11. Asus Live
12. Hardware Monitor
13. Elsa Gladiac 920
14. Video Module
15. Drivers
16. Gainward CARDEXpert GeForce3
17. Video-In And Video-Out With Philips Chip
18. Powerpack / Expert Tool
19. Expert Tool, Continued
20. Taskbar
21. Video Recorder, Continued
22. Video Recorder, Continued
23. Hercules 3D Prophet III
24. Connectors And TV-Out
25. Drivers
26. Leadtek WinFast GeForce3
27. Drivers
28. Drivers, Continued
29. Taskbar
30. Winfox

The flagship of the PC graphics business is GeForce3. Unfortunately, if you tried to buy a GeForce3 card in recent weeks you may have experienced a big disappointment. Despite the press being able to test GeForce3 as early as March, the average customer sought for boards in vain. In fact, it wasn't until the beginning of June that the first boards began to appear on store shelves.

Maybe, NVIDIA had taken on too much. The GeForce3 had, in fact, been scheduled for launch in January. At Cebit in March, NVIDIA claimed that delivery would begin soon thereafter. When the end of May rolled around and there still weren't any GeForce3 graphics cards on the market, a lot of users began to get annoyed. Fantastic test results are useless if you can only read about them.

Now, finally, consumer demand is being met - NVIDIA has officially introduced revision A5 of the chip, after having chucked the A3 stepping as "non-final." Tom's Hardware has taken this opportunity to test seven GeForce3 graphics cards from Asus, Elsa, Hercules, Gainward, Leadtek, MSI and Visiontek.