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| Quality
and Installation Of The Winfast
GeForce 2 MX DH Pro |
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on in... |
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Physically
there are quite a few items worth
mentioning. This is a high quality product,
all components were mounted cleanly, all solder
connections were solid and all of the traces were
clean. Although this card is based on
an nVidia reference design, it is immediately
evident that Leadtek wanted to distinguish this
card from it's competition and made some
"welcome" modifications. It is also
obvious that Leadtek is trying to cater to more
than one market with this card (over-clockers,
casual gamers and "business"
users). The first thing you'll notice when
you see this card is the oversized heatsink /
fan...
Considering
that nVidia's reference design doesn't even call
for a heatsink because of the very low power
consumption of the MX, seeing a cooler of this
type was very exciting. A heatsink is only
good if it makes good contact with the chip
beneath it though, so we pulled the heatsink off
to see what interface material was being used (you
all know how much I hate thermal epoxy here!)...
Woo
Hoo! Thermal paste! Leadtek did the right
thing and used thermal paste to make sure the
default cooling solution works efficiently.
It could have been applied a little more
"cleanly" but at least the most
important portion, the center of the chip, was
completely covered. Removing the heatsink
also reveals the thermal probe which monitors the
chip's temperature. At first I was happy to
see the thermal probe but I thought, because of
it's location, there was no way for the heatsink
to lay flush on the MX chip. Then I looked
at the underside of the heatsink and saw that
Leadtek bored a small circle out of the cooler to
insure it would lay flat. Leadtek put much thought
into the design of this card.
The
other obvious physical feature you'll notice is
the secondary monitor connector. We're sure
that you've read about nVidia's Twin-View
technology but not many cards have shipped with
dual-outputs to fully take advantage of it
yet. Having the ability to connect two
monitors is great. It allows a user to place their
work on one screen and their tools on another,
increasing the overall workspace considerably. You
can also clone the output so both screens show the
same thing, a great feature should you ever be
giving a presentation. There is also a
TV-Out connector for playing DVDs or gaming on a
television. Leadtek ships the DH Pro with an
adapter so the TV-Out can be used with either an
S-Video cable or a standard RCA type composite
cable. Leadtek also includes WinFast DVD
software, making DVD playback a cinch. The
drivers that shipped with the DH Pro were based on
the nVidia v.6.27 reference drivers. There
are a few changes to the nVidia interface, but not
much else. We took a few screenshots to give
you an idea of what they look like but all of our
testing was done using the v.6.31 reference
drivers.
We
quickly want to mention that the 2D image quality
was excellent with the DH Pro. Because of
the fast RAMDAC, you're able to run your monitor
at high refresh rates which in general improves
and stabilizes picture quality. We
especially like the GeForce 2 MX's Digital
Vibrance feature (covered
much more in depth here). The
brightness, contrast and overall intensity of
images was excellent. If
you looked at the shot of the Advanced Settings
tab (upper left), you'll see two options...one for
overclocking and one for Hardware
monitoring. This is some good stuff, let's
take a peek! WinFox?
Who's That?
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