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| Quality
and Installation Of The nVidia GeForce 2 MX-400 |
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Lights, Camera, Action! |
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The the MX-400 card we tested was supplied by
nVidia. As you can see, it
is a simple reference design. Once the new
model starts circulating and gaining popularity
with OEM's, I'm sure we'll see various changes to
the over all look of the card.
The GPU came with a stock heat sink mounted on it.
Like the original MX, I think we'll see OEM's
tacking on more serious cooling solutions which
should help the end-user in their overclocking
efforts. This model also came
equipped with one monitor output and one TV-OUT
connection.
The reference card also came
equipped with 64MB of Mosel Vitalic SDRAM running at
a default clock speed of 166 MHz.
Curiously, before confirming the part
number on the Mosel website, we thought the card
was equipped with DDR RAM. During our
testing, we loaded Powerstrip and NVMax so we could try some
over clocking of this puppy. To our
surprise, the memory timings were being reported
as 334MHz, which would be expected of DDR RAM
(166MHz x 2). The reason for this discrepancy is unclear at this time, but we have
confirmed that it is, in fact, SDRAM.
We have also found
that this reference card was barely overclockable.
Although we were able to get the core speed up to
225MHz, we could barely eke out a measly 10MHz on
the RAM without the card becoming unstable.
Whether this is a result of the odd timing error,
I don't know, but as a result, we didn't have any
over clocking results worth posting.
Thanks to the unified nature of the Detonator
drivers, installation was a piece of cake leaving
little to report. If there is one thing that
is fairly idiot proof, it's installing a video
card that has an nVidia chipset on it.
So, what do you say we
cut the idle chitchat and start cranking out some
numbers...hmm?
To the
Benchmarks
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