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So what is up with the TNT2-A? (No, it's not a Canadian TNT2, eh.) The TNT2-A is essentially identical in design to the TNT2 that we all know and love, except that it uses a .22 micron fab as opposed to the original TNT2's .25 micron fab. The advantages of a .22 micron fab are many. First, .22 micron chips take up less space, so more chips can be made on the same wafer at the same time. When you can make more chips at the same time each chip costs less to make, so the cost of making a TNT2-A is lower than the cost of making a TNT2. Second, .22 micron chips have narrower and shorter circuitry, which lowers overall resistance in the chip, which means less heat. Less heat means better over clocking speeds are attainable. So the average .22 micron TNT2-A should theoretically be able to clock faster than the average .25 micron TNT2. Lower costs and faster speeds make the TNT2-A and its smaller dye size a good thing. When you take into account the GA660 Plus' wonderful cooling and the 6ns SDRAM, you can see that Gigabyte's engineers were looking to make an aggressively priced and aggressively clocked board.
3D/2D Acceleration
Second-generation TwiN texel 32-bit graphics pipeline
100% hardware triangle setup
Optimized for Direct3D acceleration with full support for DirectX6.1
32-bit ARGB rendering with destination alpha 24-bit Z-buffer, 8-bit stencil buffer
Anisotropic filtering (better than Tri-linear MIP-mapping)
Per pixel perspective correct texture mapping including Fog, Light, and MIP-mapping
High performance 128-bit 2D/GUI/DirectDraw acceleration
Video Acceleration
Hardware YUV 4:2:2 and 4:2:0 color space conversion support
Multi-tap X and Y filtering
Support planar YUV12 (4:2:0) to/from packed (4:2:2) conversion for software MPEG acceleration
DVD sub-picture alpha blended compositing
Video acceleration for DirectShow, MPEG-2 and MPEG-1
AGP 4X Sideband Support
AGP 4X/2X/1X mode with full sideband/Execute mode support
Supports over 900MB/sec in AGP 4X mode
Graphics Controller NVIDIA RIVA TNT2-A at 149MHz or 170MHz turbo
Memory 32MB 6ns SDRAM at 166MHz or 180MHz turbo
RAMDAC 300MHz
Bus Type AGP (4x/2x/1x) w/
full sideband/Execute mode support
VGA Connector DB-15 analog monitor connector
VESA DDC2B, DPMS, VBE 2.0/3.0
Max Resolution 2048 X 1536
Bandwidth 3GB/sec
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