The Package - The Impact 4 videocard comes in a nicely designed box accompanied with a small but clear and decent manual. The driver CD contains the basics like DirectX, NVIDIA reference based drivers, a few game patches, Powerstrip and a trial version of PowerDVD. Furthermore the box of course contains a videocard.

When we look closely at the card we'll notice that it is looking quite close to NVIDIA's reference GeForce2 GTS design. We can find an additional TV-Output by S-VHS module. You can connect the videocard to your bigscreen with supplied cable. When we remove the fan we'll notice the shiny nVIDIA GeForce2 Pro logo (hey, you never know) .. The core of the Graphics Processing Unit is running at a steady 200 MHz.

The memory on this videocard seems to come from a manufacturer unknown to me. Ascend, this doesn't necessarily have to be a bad thing (or I should brush up on memory manufacturers) but I have slight reservations about overclocking the card. But we'll see that in a later part of this review. The memory is rated 5ns and is of course DDR based, thus 2x200 MHz.

The 'normal' GeForce2 GTS graphics processor can render 3D scenes faster than it's memory can handle. Thus the memory is by far the biggest limiting factor to push some more frames per second out of the videocard. Here's where the PRO comes in sight. Newer and faster DDR memory modules widen up memory bandwidth and thus result in a smaller bottleneck. The older model GeForce2 GTS videocards had a memory frequency of 333 MHz while the PRO version is clocked at a feasible (2x200Mhz) 400 MHz. This means more memory bandwidth and thus a faster videocard that already was one of the fastest around. The GeForce2 GTS runs at a default core frequency of 200 MHz, the Ultra has an astounding 250 MHz core frequency the PRO remains at 200 MHz. When we make a small calculation we will notice that the memory bandwidth is good:

The memory frequency of Impact 4 is running at 400MHz (200MHz DDR) and that is the nominal frequency for 5ns chips. Let's calculate:

((2x128bit) x 200MHz) : 8bit  = 6400 MB/sec

Now let's check out a standard SDRAM GeForce2 MX shall we:

(1x128) x 166MHz :8bit = 2656 MB/Sec

And the DDR GeForce2 GTS:

((2x128bit) x 166MHz) : 8bit  = 5312 MB/sec

And now you know what the key issue on the GeForce2 is people .. memory bandwidth.