Win, Lose or Ti: 21 GeForce Titanium Boards

Leadtek - Elegant And Cool

Leadtek's boards are considered the beauties of the video card scene. Where other companies use aggressive styling with loud colors and large fans, Leadtek tries for an elegant and refined look. The huge, heavy heatsinks on the memory and GPU are very impressive, to say the least. Thanks to these new heatsinks, Leadtek has finally solved the problem of the overheating memory heatsinks, which dogged the company's first GF3 and GF2 Ultra cards. The GF2 Ti also surprised us with a very clever cooling solution.

The models and their features:

The GeForce2 TI model Titanium TH is strongly reminiscent of the older GF2 Pro board. The GPU fan is located to the side of the heatsink, and blows over it through an air channel. This is supposed to prevent so-called hot spots in the middle of the heatsink, which usually occur where the fan drive is located.

The Ti200 and Ti 500 differ only in memory (4ns and 3,8 ns, respectively) and GPU. Both GeForce3 cards use the Conexant CX25871-13 TV-Out encoder chip. The GF2 Ti features the Chrontel 7007A-T instead. Another idiosyncrasy of the GF3 boards, besides their excellent cooling, is the extensive hardware monitoring feature set. Three LEDs on the board are meant to help diagnose hardware problems. The GPU temperature is measured with an external thermal diode. Lastly, the fan speed can also be monitored.

All three boards share the same software bundle. The game bundle consists of the GF3-enabled games Gunlock and DroneZ. Leadtek also includes the software DVD Player WinDVD, as well as the 3D viewer software Cult3D. Beyond that, the software is what is considered standard: NVIDIA reference driver and a few practical tools.