8
February 2001
Revised:
17 February 2001
Background
Not since the
Fall of 1998 and the TNT1 has NVIDIA gone with the idea that
"one size fits all" when it comes to video cards.
The Spring of 1999 brought with it the TNT2 and the introduction
of a family of cards. We saw this with TNT2 and the
TNT2 Ultra. However, NVIDIA saw the need to fill in the gap
between the TNT2 and the TNT2 Ultra with the TNT2 Pro. They
also produced "budget" versions of the TNT2 (the
M64 and the Vanta) that, unfortunately for performance, reduced
the memory path to 64-bits from 128-bit.
With the original
GeForce cards they only produced three primary varieties for
the consumer crowd - the 32MB SDR, the 32MB DDR and the 64MB
DDR versions. However, they also introduced the the Quadro
and Quadro MXR for the high-end workstation market.
NVIDIA's latest,
the GeForce2 adds more options then ever before. For the low
end, there is the GeForce2 MX (and all its varieties). The
mainstream card was the GeForce2 GTS. The high-end consumer
card was the GeForce2 Ultra. The workstation version, the
Quadro2, also comes in multiple varieties.
OEM's who wanted
to add more power to their systems, could not absorb the cost
of the Ultra so NVIDIA appeased them with the GeForce2 Pro.
While offering near Pro performance in some situations, the
price of the Pro fit squarely between the GTS and the Ultra.
It came equipped with 5ns DDR memory which gave it an effective
bandwidth of 400MHz.
GeForce2
Pro = GeForce2 Pro?
That all seems
pretty clear...so what's the problem? Well recently, there
have been some 32MB GeForce2 "Pro" cards hitting
the market. Not wanting to drop a bundle on a 64MB card when
the NV20 was right around the corner, I jumped at the opportunity
to purchase one. I bought a 32MB Pro from www.evga.com
- even before it appeared on their site. The first thing
I noticed was the "Pro" sticker tacked on to the
end of the stenciled "GeForce2" on the PCB. It seemed
a little odd. The box was a GeForce2 MX box with a "Pro"
sticker pasted over the MX. No big deal I thought. The card
itself seemed well made and I had no problems installing it.
However, the BIOS screen called it a "GeForce2 GTS"
not a "Pro". That didn't really sit well with me.
When the drivers also detected it as a "GTS", I
began to worry that I might really have a GTS and not a Pro.
The speed settings of core=200MHz and memory=333MHz were consistant
with a GTS card. When the card finally appeared on their site,
it included the following statement:
Huh? How could
it be considered a "Pro" if it did not include the
faster 5ns memory? I thought that was the primary difference
between the GTS and the Pro was the 5ns memory (not including
the extra 32MB of RAM).
I contacted
eVGA and told them the problems I discovered. Andrew Han,
from eVGA, was kind enough to explain the situation to me.
Apparently, NVIDIA has stopped producing the GTS chipset and
replaced it with the Pro chipset. That makes sense for NVIDIA
if they are getting good yields on the Pro chipset. Dropping
the GTS helps them focus their line. In its place, NVIDIA
is sending the Pro instead. When a manufacturer request a
32MB configuration, they get the Pro chipset with the slower
6ns memory. Since they didn't raise the prices, Andrew said
it was like getting a free upgrade to the Pro. Seemed like
a decent deal...but things aren't always as they appear.
