Behold the GeForce2 MX in all its frugality....
We don't need to go
into a lot of detail on the installation process
for you. It was all very uneventful, just
the way we like it. Pop the card in, install
the drivers, you know the drill. Here
is a shot of the control panel for the NV11
currently. However we are told this will
change soon with a driver update.
(click)
We
then installed the "CoolBits"
registry tweak (download link) to access the
over-clocking control panel. You knew we
were going to over-clock this bad boy,
right?
|
| Overclocking
The GeForce2MX |
| A
little tweak here and a little
there... |
|
The
board we received directly from NVidia, as you can
see in the above shot, was minus the heat
sink and fan combo we are use to seeing on GeForce
and TNT boards of the past. This is a
testament to the MX's excellent power
"sipping" architecture. The chip
actually gets warm but not hot to the touch when
clocked to the stock 175MHz. speed. However,
we were able to overclock the chip to 195MHz. Core
and 210MHz. Memory clocks, right out of the
box. That brought us to the next step in
tweaking the MX. We pulled a heatsink off of
a Leadtek Winfast GeForce 1 card and plugged it
into the already prepared push-pin holes on the
GF2MX board. Here is the result of that
effort.
As you
will note in this picture, the active
heat-sink/fan assembly doesn't have a site on the
reference board to plug its power connector
into. This is easily remedied by hooking up
a three pin male power header on the end of a pig
tail power splice, as shown here.
All
you need to do is just plug the two black and red
pins into the corresponding mates on the fan
connector and your are in business. Now, all
of this will be a non-issue should you pick up a
retail version of the GF2MX that has a heat-sink
and fan on it, although we are sure that there
will be many that don't due to cost
constraints. Regardless, this is a quick and
easy mod that you can do yourself without much
trouble. Just remember to apply a nice thin
coat of thermal grease or paste on the backside of
the sink and you'll have an excellent cooling
solution. We could have looked around for
larger sinks that fit of course but this was such
an easy "bolt-on" solution that we just
went with it. Here are the results again of our
minimal efforts.
This
is a decent gain for such a quick
modification. Also, as a side note, the
memory clock was pegged at 210MHz. which was as
far as it would go with the slider. However,
we get the distinct impression that it could go
even higher with stability. The core clock
made it to 205 without artifacts, popping pixels
or a lock-up of any kind.
So,
let's take a look at the numbers, shall we?
Benchmarks
and Overclocked Speed
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