Creative Labs (Europe)
3D Blaster GeForce3 Ti 500

Due to the unfortunate fact that we where offline for a while this article is delayed a bit, however the day we went down in December we received two new products from Creative Labs Europe's line up of videocards. A 3D Blaster Personal Cinema and the product we will review today, the 3D Blaster GeForce3 Ti 500.

At this moment, actually just a few weeks before the announcement of GeForce4 the GeForce3 Ti500 is the fastest 3D Graphics consumer videocard available to date. The last products we reviewed from Creative was their GeForce3, performance was right on par with the NVIDIA reference design. Basically a very good product but what I missed and noted in that  review was some custom made items like ram sinks and high-performance cooling, I recall it overclocked like a lunatic despite those missing features. The Titanium series of GPUs are to be produced on TSMC’s 0.15-micron-enhanced process technology that features higher performance transistors and have been equipped with faster memory. When we take a closer look at the new Ti 500 we see that Creative has entered a whole new ballgame and jumped into a design that the user likes to see. Let's take a look at an image:

Equipped with a Ti500 240 MHz GPU and armed with 64MB 2x250 (500 MHz DDR) memory for the time being this will be the new pride and joy from Creative Labs Europe. Clearly we can see the new design. Don't let it fool you, this is a NVIDIA reference based by MSI produced videocard. The big change ? Clearly you have seen it already, a rather huge looking cooling unit that covers the ram chips and graphics core and all that in the color Titanium ..

When we do a small calculation we notice that the Ti 500 has a kickass ((2x128bit) x 250MHz) : 8bit  = 8 GB/sec  !! memory bandwidth, combine this with a faster clocked Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) and you have the fastest and versatile consumer videocard to date. The Ti500 will compute at 960 billion operations per second (BOPS) It's 1.5x the GeForce 3 Ti 200 performance at the suggested retail price of $299 which is of course way lower in the stores.