NV17 vs NV18 - Leadtek sprints out of gate

The INQWELL'S review team was just about to complete a comprehensive review of the Leadtek WinFast A170 Pro TD MyVIVO - an MX 460 GPU, when the opportunity arose to take a quick look at one of the first NV18 AGP 8x based cards to hit the streets - the Leadtek WinFast A180 DDR TH MyVIVO - an MX440 GPU.

We hear on the old €urovine that stocks will be hitting distribution in Europe as early as next week.

We've been taking our time with the A170 review, as this is a very interesting card because of the bundled hardware/software solution - MyVIVO.

Rather than concentrate on the raw graphics performance we looked at the "connectivity" and software capabilities of the card. The full review should be available in the next week or so.

Unfortunately we don't yet have an AGP 8x motherboard to hand - it would be so interesting to see the results head to head with a 4x card in a 4x system -- so we have used the Leadtek WinFast K7N415DA, coupled with an AMD Athlon XP 2100 with 512Mb of Crucial DDR266 memory running Windows XP Professional.

In essence the differences between the NV18 and NV17 GPU are simply down to the AGP 8x support, but Leadtek have added to the standard dual-head output to include a VIVO port and a new port to connect to their up-and-coming WinFast Cinema TV Box. Also new to the A180 is WinFox II and Hardware Monitor Software along with the necessary connector cables for VIVO and a replacement software package now called WinFast PVR along with an enhanced games bundle.

Leadtek has a reputation for producing high quality cards and the A180 doesn't disappoint. There's less of it and it's easier to open.

Inside the box, the contents are pretty similar to the A170 - for example the heat-sink is identical to the A170. Close examination of the board itself reveals a few changes in layout and supporting chips to the A170 (see pic) but has a similar quality feel to it. The software bundle has changed, in particular the colour matching software is now from Coloreal, which works well with the card/monitor combination, with many .cfm's provided on the install CD.

Installation was pretty easy, a matter of getting rid of the old card drivers, then bunging the new lamp in and taking the old lamp out, re-installing the drivers.

A quick reboot, a re-install of Winfox and it, err, worked.

The card has dual monitor support via nView, even providing a DVI/VGA converter, on my two monitor setup. Drop one monitor and plug in a TV instead and you have either dual sync displays or expanded desktop - all configured from within Winfox/nView.

Below is a comparison table of results from the A170 and A180 - the initial scores are "out the box" configs, the rest are clocking of the memory or GPU speeds. On removal of the cards when testing was complete, both heat-sinks were still hardly warm.

Graphics/Memory	A170 3D Marks	A180 3D Marks
Standard Config	6359	5991
310/530	6356	6379
320/530	6351	6455
350/530	6479	6538
350/550	6541	6702

For a budget card, this has a lot to offer and with a street price of around £130.00 we'd say its not a bad buy at all! It overclocks well and seems to be pretty stable compared to some cards on new silicon we've seen over the years. Next up is to get the card back and see it perform on an AGP 8x motherboard and see if there are more obvious performance differences. Can we have a "Cinema TV" box next time too? µ