Usually whenever Abit's name is mentioned, you immediately associate them with Motherboards. Or to be more accurate very good motherboards. Or to be even more accurate amongst the best manufacturers of overclocking motherboards available. But Abit's talents do not stop there, oh no. We now have our grubby little hands on Abit's interpretation of Nvidia's latest and greatest; the GeForce 256. The Siluro, whilst not based on the DDR version of the GeForce chipset, has everything you'd expect and that little bit extra...

As is normal for the GeForce cards the list of supported features is very impressive:

• 256-bit GCP, 256-bit graphics architecture running at 120MHz
• Integrated transform and lighting
• Built-in 32MB SDRAM frame buffer running at 166MHz
• AGP 4X
• 32-colour ARGB with destination alpha
• 32-bit Z/Stencil
• 8-bit stencil
• 15 Million Polygons/sec, 480 Million Pixels/sec
• Cube environment mapping
• Anisotropic texture filtering
• 350MHz Palette-DAC resolution up to 2048x1536 at full colour
• Digital Flat Panel interface with scaling and filtering for Flat panels up to 1600 x 1200
• Digital interface to NTSC/PAL encoders
• DVD-ready and HDTV-ready motion compensation for MPEG-2 decoding
• Complete VIP (Video Interface Port) 2.0 video implementation
• OpenGL ICD for full OpenGL support
• Fully PC99 and PC99a compliant

What does this mean in the real world? It's fast. And it does a load of other stuff as well. Like what? Well how does Hardware DVD and HDTV decoding, TV out and a separate interface for output direct to a digital Flat Panel Monitor grab you for starters?

Installation of the card is a breeze - just pop it in the AGP slot, boot up and then run the supplied driver disk then one more reboot and you're done. The image quality is very sharp on the screen, as you would expect from a card that will do anything up to 240Hz refresh rate. But when it comes down to it we're interested in how it all comes together 3D wise. Its fair to say that the card does very well, especially up against our reference card, a Diamond Viper V770, based on the original TNT2 chipset. Clocking in a score of 3,601 which is an increase of almost a third over the V770 running on the same system. Very impressive results just for a new video card, especially when you consider that you would not see anything near that for just a Processor upgrade.

To make things interesting we thought we'd try the latest Nvidia Detonator 3.68 reference drivers and see how they affected the benchmarks. Results? Identical! Little bit strange until we investigated the Abit drivers a little bit more and found that they were based around that version of the detonator drivers anyway. Full marks to Abit for being bang up to date!

So, all in all a great video card that's going to add a very large increase to any system in 3D performance. Not really a lot else to say. It's a bit disappointing really for a card coming from Abit and not being able to play with it....... Hang on, on closer inspection that 32Mg of SDRAM on the card turns out to be 5ns; there must be some scope for a bit of 'tweaking' in there somewhere. If only we had some way to increase the clock speeds.... But wait, what's this little program on the driver CD called 'Graphics Max'? I say, I do believe it's an overclocking utility - Abit our faith in you is restored once more! With this little beauty you can increase both the core and the memory speeds up to practically anything you want. After having a play around we found that the increase made no real difference on the 2D but 3D was amazing. As you can see from Figure 1, the increase in the various speeds can make a large difference but it is a case of playing around to find where the best compromise is for each individual. There's a high quality fan on the heatsink itself, which really does keep the card cool - ours barely got warm even when we were pushing it. Having said that, once it goes into a proper system with all that heat being generated anyway, the card probably won't stay cool for long. We had a lot of success increasing the memory speed with the card behaving itself right upto 200MHz, but we couldn't get the core speed past 140Mhz without the system locking up straight away. You have to remember though, that we had ideal conditions and weren't looking at stability over any great length of time, so you may no be able to achieve these results in a system that is used for general applications.

The card comes with a TV out connector for S-VHS, a very comprehensive manual, a DVD player and a couple of games. All in all, the Siluro is a great addition for any serious games player and in true Abit style you can make sure you get the absolute best out of the card!