The Magnificent Seven: GeForce3 Board Round-up

Introduction

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.

Uwe Scheffel