TNT2 Ultra the Abit way

Abit is known as one of the premier motherboard makers in the world. Most of us have at least some fond memories of our first SoftMenu experience…ahh the joys of overclocking. As the 3D market has shifted, Nvidia found itself in a unique position. They were the last major chipmaker that had not merged with a board maker. In my opinion, this was fantastic for the gaming community. Suddenly, dozens of smaller, relatively unknown companies stepped in to fill the void left by the likes of Diamond and STB. Eventually, Asus, Gigabyte, and now Abit entered the game. Why is this so great for gamers? How many variants of the Voodoo3 have you seen? Three to be exact, all made by the same company. Try searching Pricewatch for a TNT2 and see how many cards turn up. There is a nearly endless number of cards to choose from, TV-out, Digital flat panel out, 16MB, 32MB, M64, Vanta, just to name a few. With the addition of the Abit Siluro line of cards, gamers now have a name that is known and trusted to spend their hard earned cash on. Abit was gracious enough to send Maximum3D one of their TNT2 Ultra boards for torture and testing. Do these video cards share the same level of quality and reliability that is synonymous with the name Abit?

Siluro GT2 Specs

-nVidia TNT2 128-bit 3D Graphics and Video Accelerator
-Full AGP 4X, sideband / pipelined transfers:
66MHz AGP clock rate bursting at 266 mega transfers per second
-Supports over 900MB/s in AGP 4X mode
-32 MB SDRAM
-Triple 8-bit 300Mhz Palette DAC
-15-pin D-sub VGA
-S-Video mini-DIN (S-Video out)
-Digital Flat Panel connector

Basically, it is a standard TNT2 board, that has the same look as the Abit mainboards, no green PCB here. There is a low profile fan/heatsink installed on the chip, and it allows for some pretty serious overclocking which will be discussed later in the review. Abit has even reinforced the mounting bracket to prevent it from bending.