First Sightings: Three Early Samples of the GeForce4 Ti4600

Leadtek WinFast A250 Ultra TD

Massive Presence: Leadtek A250 TD

Leadtek's A250 Ultra series features a most impressive cooling solution. The top of the card is covered almost completely by an enormous heatsink, which is cooled by two fans, each of which has its own dust filter. The heatsink thus cools not only the GPU, but the memory, as well. The bottom of the card also sports a heatsink, this one passive, however. A thermal pad below the GPU ensures the contact between the PCB and the heatsink. Thankfully, this massive cooling solution isn't overly noisy, although it is far from quiet. Still, it makes a lot less noise than Creative's 'blow-drier.'

The rest of the feature list is pretty much standard fare: TV-Out (Conexant CX25871-13) and DVI. Hardware monitoring is only included on the TDH models. The GPU runs at the specified 300 MHz, and the 128 MB of 2.8ns memory is also right on target, at 650 MHz.

A second heatsink on the back

Leadtek was the only company that sent us its own drivers with its card. This revision still had a small bug under Windows XP, so, instead, we used NVIDIA's reference driver v27.42 for performance testing. The new WinFoxII suite already ran flawlessly, though. The WinFox suite is an extensive collection of tools, some more useful than others. It includes everything from overclocking tools and detailed system information to simple Windows games à la Minesweeper.

A well-made heatsink

The software bundle consists of the games DroneZ and Gunlok, as well as WinFast DVD, Cult3D and the tool collection Colorific/3Deep/True Internet Color by E-Color.