Who on Earth is LeadTek you might ask? A Taiwanese comic book super hero? Close but no cigar. Until now, unless you were a frequenter to Fry's Electronics and searched under every nook and cranny, you'd probably not have the foggiest idea. LeadTek is a small Taiwanese video card and motherboard manufacturer that has actually made some retail breakthroughs at stores such as Fry's over the past two years. If indeed you are one of those Fry's Electronics hunters you might have noticed a few LeadTek graphics card boxes on sale, including Permedia 2 and Intel 740 based boards as well as videoconferencing products. But don't let the fact that LeadTek is no Diamond or Creative dissuade you. They've managed to come out with the very first 32MB TNT2 board, which is on sale before now and actually before any other company- an achievement in itself.

Being a company such as LeadTek means that there's little chance of a marketing or creative budget (their annual turnover is only $47million) being spent on fancy boxes and names. But in a market full of Blasters, Vipers and Xentors, do you really care if Leadtek's is called the WinFast 3D S320 II? Probably not. So minus the 'groovy' name, what we're dealing with is an NVIDIA TNT2 (NOT Ultra) based card with 32MB of fast SGRAM backed up nicely with a fast 300MHz RAMDAC (For a full run-down of the TNT2 technology feel free to go back and read the preview). Make sure that you DO have a free AGP slot as the S320 II ONLY comes in an AGP flavor and it seems as though there are no plans to release a PCI version. This makes sense though, the minimum specifications for any TNT2 is a Pentium II and in all honesty we'd not recommend you using one with anything less than a Pentium II 300MHz. Being CPU dependant, the S320 II really needs at least a 400MHz CPU to really kick in.

The card itself varies very little from NVIDIA's reference design and has an 8x2MB layout of SEC 150MHz memory chips (four on each side of the card). The memory is obviously clocked at 150MHz, which is in compliance with NVIDIA's technical recommendations. But surprisingly the S320 II's graphics clock is NOT set to NVIDIA's specification of 125MHz. Surprisingly (and refreshingly), LeadTek chose to ship the board at a DEFAULT speed of 140MHz. Heat (more on that later) is not a real problem for the TNT2 chipset in general but nevertheless with the fan and heat sink combination (almost identical to Diamond's Viper V770) on-board, the S320 II seems to have no trouble whatsoever running at this increased speed. We witnessed zero lock ups or page faults (always a good sign). Clearly, when heat dissipation is handled well, the TNT2 is capable of going in excess of 125MHz.

Configurations Available

S320 II-16
16MB w/ S-Video and Composite TV Out
S320 II-16Pro
16MB w/ S-Video and Composite TV Out, Digital LCD Flat Panel Output
S320 II-32
32MB w/ S-Video and Composite TV Out
S320 II-32Pro
32MB w/ S-Video and Composite TV Out, Digital LCD Flat Panel Output