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Leadtek's A400 Series Goes Heavy Metal |
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Written by Mavke
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Wednesday, 29 September 2004 |
And what about Tom's Hardware Guide? Well they have reviewed the following graphic cards : Leadtek A400 TDH, Leadtek A400 GT TDH & Leadtek A400 Ultra TDH. With its newest line of cards, nVidia-only card maker Leadtek continues on with the unique nomenclature of its products. Now, the naming scheme has reached 400, or A400, to be more precise. The name is easily explained - take the codename of a given nVidia chip, in this case the NV40 of the GeForce 6800 line, and tack on a zero.
 Leadtek's A400 Series Goes Heavy Metal
Leadtek offers three versions of the A400 with an AGP 8x interface, namely the A400 TDH (GeForce 6800), the A400 GT TDH (GeForce 6800 GT) and the A400 Ultra TDH. As has become the custom for Leadtek's products over the last few years, these cards don't follow nVidia's reference layout and cooling solution but use Leadtek's own coolers. As a result, in addition to being designed for heavy duty, you can take the "heavy" part literally. The cards don't just look heavy, they are heavy! If you're a fan of hefty and extravagant cooling solutions, then Leadtek may have the right card for you. Luckily, the card isn't as loud as one might fear from looking at the cooler, and are actually comparatively quiet, although nowhere near silent.
Leadtek really stands out from the crowd of nVidia card makers, which is already apparent in the naming scheme used for its cards. As mentioned above, instead of using the official chip name, Leadtek instead takes nVidia's internal code name for the chip (NV40) and adds a zero to create the product name.
The massive coolers used on the Leadtek cards can't be found on any other card and ensure very good cooling efficiency. On the downside, they are also quite literally a burden to the card, which weighs a full 740 grams in the case of the GT and Ultra versions. This is simply too much, at least if you plan on moving your PC around from time to time, to take it to a LAN party, for example. The worst case scenario would be that the card dislodges, falls on another component and damages it. The unnecessarily massive heatsink on the back of the card is partly responsible for the card's weight issues.
The software bundle that Leadtek ships with the card is very convincing, however. Two current and challenging games paired with two older, slightly exotic games that are probably not part of the standard gamer's collection should make for a good number of enjoyable gaming hours. The bundle is rounded off with a software DVD player as well as several helpful utilities. The only thing we found missing that would really complement the cards' feature set would be a Video-In feature.
The 3D performance of the three A400 cards is outstanding. Without a doubt, the A400 Ultra TDH is the fastest of the trio, but the GT version isn't far behind at all, giving it the better overall price to performance ratio. Although the standard A400 can't keep up with its bigger siblings due to the limitation to 12 pipelines, it still offers very compelling performance when compared to high-end cards of the previous generation.
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