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As a hardware review site, we come across many products competing for the same space in a particular market. No where is this more evident than the video card market. nVidia has been, and now that there is one less competitor, surely will remain the most dominant supplier of video chipsets to OEMs. Many companies that sell products using chipsets from nVidia, simply take nVidia's reference design and churn out cards that are essentially exact replicas. This practice makes is much harder to choose one product over another as they are all basically the same. Users are forced to choose a product strictly by it's price point or software bundle.
With the exception of a heatsink here and TV-Out there, all of the GeForce 2 MX based cards we've tested here on HotHardware have been virtually identical. All of them performing within a few "points" of
each other and offering no special features to make one card stand head and shoulders above the rest.
Today, all that finally changes as we take a look at the
Leadtek WinFast GeForce2 MX DH Pro. Although it is based on an nVidia
reference design, this new card from Leadtek offers some new features that help separate it from all of the ordinary "run of the mill" MX cards. The Winfast GeForce 2 MX DH Pro is chock full of features including Dual monitor outputs to truly utilize nVidia's Twin-View technology, a huge heatsink / fan combo and some very innovative and useful hardware monitoring software. Let's get into some of the nitty-gritty....
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| Specifications
Of Leadtek Winfast GeForce 2 MX DH
Pro |
| A
reference board with some twists! |
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Graphics
Chipset:
- Nvidia 2nd-generatioin 256-bit GPU with new Hypertexel architecture (4 texels per clock)
- 32MB on-board memory
- 20M Triangles/sec through T&L and Set-up
- 700-Megatexel fill rate
- Full acceleration for Microsoft DirectX 7 and OpenGL 1.2 ICD
- DirectX Texture Compression & S3TC support
- 2.8 GB/s memory bandwidth
- Digital Vibrance control
- NVIDIA Shading Rasterizer
(NSR)
- High-Definition Video Processor
(HDVP)
- Comprehensive AGP 2X/4X support with fast writes and execute mode
- 32-bit color
- 32-bit Z/stencil buffer
- Cube environment mapping
- DirectX and S3 texture compression
- Integrated 350MHz RAMDAC
- Digital dual display architecture, supporting dual CRTC/simultaneous dual display (Features only provide by multi-output models)
- TwinView Dual Display for Dual VGA & TV-out
- Support RCA & S-video TV-out
- Special Designed Active Cooling Module
- Hardware Sensor to monitor temperature, voltage and speed of the chip, cooling module and board
3 LEDs are embedded onboard to help users identify the hardware status
Cooling solution:
- on-board heat-sink cooling fan
TV-out:
- S-video/RCA TV-out up to 800x600 resolution
Driver support:
- Win 2K, Win ME, Win 9x, Win NT4
Product Bundle:
- Y Cable, RCA cable, S-video cable
- WinFox, WinDVD, Speed Runner, Cult3D,
Colorific
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The
specification list reads like many other GeForce 2
MX cards but with a few notable exceptions.
Notice the Hardware Monitoring and true Dual
Display capability. Leadtek opted to take
advantage of all the extended features of the MX
chipset. Our
Leadtek Winfast GeForce 2 MX DH Pro (which I'll be
referring to as the DH Pro for the remainder of
the review...why? because that is one long frigin'
name!) shipped with Hyundai 6NS SDRAM clocked at
166MHz.
Hyundai
RAM has proven to be fairly over-clockable in the
past and with memory bandwidth playing such an
important role with the current generation of
video cards, having over-clockable memory is a
definite advantage. We had pretty good luck while
over-clocking the DH Pro. We won't give away
too much this early in the review...let's continue
on and see what this puppy is made of!
Installation
and Drivers
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