NVIDIA rocks the Boat with TNT2

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The Boards

I was testing 3 different versions of TNT2-boards. A 16 MB board with a TNT2 running at 125 MHz chip clock and 150 MHz memory clock, a 32 MB board with TNT2 running at 150 MHz chip clock and 183 MHz memory clock and finally a special Diamond 32 MB board with TNT2 running at 175 MHz chip clock and no less than 200 MHz memory clock. The Diamond board was using 5 ns SDRAM, the other two boards were using 5.5 ns SDRAM. Those three different clock speeds are simply showing some configurations that are possible with TNT2. None of the 3D-card makers could yet confirm which kind of configuration they are planning to use. I am also deliberately avoiding the term 'ultra' for the higher clock speed versions of TNT2, because NVIDIA is not sure if the term 'ultra' will be used to distinguish between the different speed versions. NVIDIA expects to produce a pretty high yield of parts running at 150 MHz or above, they are suggesting numbers in the two-digit percentage range. NVIDIA leaves it up to the card vendor to decide on how high to clock TNT2 on their boards. The two reference boards were equipped with a S-VHS video-out, the Diamond board came without it. None of the boards had a digital output for flat panels. All boards came with a cooling fan on top of the TNT2-chip, which did a very good job on keeping TNT2 pretty cool. The TNT-board from STB is e.g. getting seriously hotter than any of the TNT2-boards did.

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