With nVidia releasing the new third generation GPUs to the public, more and more people can afford a GeForce3. It's very nice to see that nVidia thought to almost all market segments. In fact they want to raise the profits competing with other manufacturers, especially ATI on a market where the old GeForce 3 was much too expensive. It's a serious mistake to think that there are companies ready to loose money for the end user's sake. No, every company wants to come up with the better product, most affordable price, greatest technology, biggest profit and largest market share. Well, in most situations these terms are incompatible, but the manager's job is to balance them as well as the buyer's job is to balance between features, performance and price. Without any doubt the nVidia mission with GeForce Ti200 was to smash concurrence disregarding other costs. In the end the user takes benefit because Nvidia entered to a new market segment with a very powerful chip. Today we will investigate the Abit solution to low cost wise market, the Abit Siluro Ti200 video card.

First look

Three months ago I reviewed Abit GF3 video card. You may want to read the review because the old GF3 is still a competitive card, more powerful than any Ti200 based card (more expensive too). The package looks very much like the GF3 one: the same particular box, a very good manual, a CD with software, an S-video cable, a RCA cable and a Y type adapter. This adapter allows the video signal output to both RCA and S-video. Unfortunately the card doesn't have a video input. The manual is very detailed and well written, in Abit traditional style. We tested the card version 1.0 with DVI and TV out.
The card is beautiful designed: black PCB, large GPU and memory heatsinks, clear organization. Abit added a Siluro metallic sheet on top of the heatsink, which doesn't have any role in the cooling process but gives a certain personality to the video card. Although Abit didn't get far from the nVidia reference design, there aren't things which can be reproached to Abit. I don't know if all versions of Siluro Ti200 come with DVI, but I am sure that TV output is an optional feature. Personally I recommend you to check before you buy and make sure that the card has DVI because the video quality on LCD is better when using the digital output. The Chrontel CH7007A chip is able to handle PAL and NTSC signals and can output a resolution up to 800x600. The quality of the TV output is good and probably that you won't notice a difference between 7007A and other PC2TV encoders. If you remember Abit GF3 had a daughter board for the TV out / TV in features, but Siluro Ti200 doesn't have one, the TV chip is placed on card's surface, as you can see in the picture below.

Abit Siluro Ti200 product picture

We will talk later about the cooling provided by the board, in the overclocking section. Until then we can see two large heatsinks, one for the core and one for the memory chips. The interesting fact is that it seems that there is only one piece of aluminum which cools down the memory chips. We will see later if there are two heatsinks for the memory...