Leadtek WinFast A350 Ultra TDH MyVIVO Video Card Review
Author: Dean Nottis
Date: January 8, 2004
Supplied By: Leadtek
Price: $340 USD
Introduction:
We'd like to thank Leadtek for their patience in allowing us to put this review online. At the time we received the Leadtek A350, information was just breaking on the poor
DirectX 9 performance of the nVidia Geforce FX series of video cards and we didn’t feel it fair to use the 45.23 drivers. We informed Leadtek we wanted to wait until a suitable DirectX 9 driver was developed by nVidia, the industry rumor was that the 5x.xx driver series were aimed to improve the DirectX 9 performance of the FX series graphics cards. I decided to wait until now, at the time the 53.03 drivers were released by nVidia, because after initial usage with these drivers it was evident nVidia was on the right track and performance issues we had initially saw were resolved for the most part. It wasn’t that we wanted to review the FX card and give it a favorably review, quite honestly performance was good in everything with the exception of DirectX 9 applications, however there were really no Direct X 9 games on the market. In all honesty we’ve yet to come across a pure DirectX 9 game that is even worth playing, with the exception of Halo a poor Xbox port. Before testing I make sure the games we are using for our reviews are games I would play. After all what’s the point of reviewing a video card with a game that gives favorable results while being just a bad game to begin with. This is a matter of opinion and I’m sure many people will argue our decision to use the games we have. However, these are the games people on the 3DXtreme staff including myself are actually playing. That said we found Tomb Raider: Angel of Death to be one of the worst games we’ve even played, irregardless of the fact that it performs terribly on the nVidia line of cards. I have played this game and come to the conclusion that it’s too bug ridden and just not even enjoyable enough to include the results in this or any other future 3DXtreme reviews. Sorry, to the sites out there that use it as a reason to convince you one card is better than another, but the game flat out sucks…try to play it before you benchmark with it. Alright now that I’ve gotten that off my chest lets have a look at the Leadtek A350 Video Card that is based on the nVidia Geforce FX5900 Ultra chipset.
The Leadtek A350 is quite impressive looking with it’s Aluminum casing and dual fan design. I found this Aluminum shell to be more functional than one may have expected, I have a fear of knocking one of the capacitors off of a $400 video card and this design really just eliminated this as a fear. I wouldn’t mind all video cards being encased as this one is. There is one downside to this, although you wouldn’t think from the pictures, this video card is much heavier than any other video card I’ve ever had installed into one of my computers. This isn’t cheap thin aluminum folks, the card was designed with quality in mind and when a company uses Aluminum like they used on the A350, they aren’t playing around. I also like the way the molex power connection is done, on the 9800 Pro it feels like someday I’ll break the molex connection from the PCB, not with the A350, it’s mounted much more securely and is really a much more solid setup in this department.
The Leadtek A350 is not only one of the heaviest video cards I’ve used it’s also one of the longest. Next to the ATI Radeon 9800 Pro you can see it’s definitely bigger.
Lastly we have a quick look at the bundle which we’ll get into in a bit. The Leadtek A350 doesn’t lack from the familiar “driver disk only” bundle we’ve become accustomed to as of late, this card actually has some functional software as well as two full version games. Included with the Leadtek A350 are Ulead Video Studio SE DVD, Ulead Cool 3D SE, WinFast PVR, WinFast DVD, WinFox II, Cult 3D, Coloreal –Embedded, Visual, Bright, Gun Metal and Big Mutha Truckers.
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