Price: $229 ESP ($225 lowest)

In terms of marketing, the GeForce 256 GPU has been NVIDIA's most talked about graphics processor, and with good reason. With features like the much-boasted about on-board T&L engine, quad pipelines, 256-bit architecture and a 350MHz RAMDAC, the GeForce takes the title as the fastest consumer 3D chip on the market. However, is it enough to warrant a $230 purchase price?

Competitively priced and offering a few extras, Leadtek has released their offering to the GeForce market, hoping to convince the critical masses that the WinFast GeForce 256, with 32MB of SDR SDRAM, has the best bang for the buck.

Wait, there's a twist though! We know you've read plenty of reviews where NVIDIA's GeForce was benchmarked innumerable times on conventional systems, so we want to do something different. We're bringing you the WinFast on a standard Celeron system and an overclocked Pentium III 500MHz to test the capabilities of the card on a not-so-standard bus. The TNT2 was notorious for not tolerating bus speeds off of spec, making it hard for the serious overclocker to sport one of these speedy cards. Hopefully, with the advent of the GeForce 256, the overclocker will once again be won over by NVIDIA's efforts.

The WinFast card is of standard GeForce reference design, with 5ns memory (rated at 200MHz) running at 166MHz. The processor, as on the competing cards, operates at a frequency of 120MHz (we'll go into overclocking in a bit). It boasts TV-out (something that the Creative 3D Blaster Annihilator is missing), comes with DVD software and includes it's own overclocking utility. While nothing as far as a gaming bundle is included, it still seems as Leadtek has gone to great measures to ensure that their package is well rounded. You'll also notice the cost, which makes the WinFast one of the more aggressively priced GeForce cards on the market.