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Today
we?ll be taking a look at yet another product
from Taiwan based X-Micro.
Not long ago I had the pleasure of taking
the Hulk V GeForce2 MX card for a ride around the
block and as you may have already heard, I liked
it! In fact, I liked it so much that it has remained the video
card of choice in my second system.
This time around, X-Micro has brought to
the table their latest offering, the X-Micro
Impact 4 Ultra.
Fresh
out of the box, it?s obvious that X-Micro has
taken the standard approach to video card
marketing and brought it to a higher level.
They haven?t spent the big bucks coming
up with different designs, like a recent Leadtek card we
reviewed, nor have they changed the cards
color scheme from green to metallic blue.
All of these imaginative designs may or may
not improve performance but they definitely
translate into higher costs to the buyer.
What X-Micro has done is strictly use a
standard reference design and let the cards
reputation speak for itself.
It?s no secret that the GeForce 2 family
of video cards are made their mark in the
industry. With
first-rate performance in all versions, is it
truly necessary to fix something that isn?t
broken? Apparently
X-Micro feels the answer to that question is no.
By sticking with a base reference design,
X-Micro has been able to remain a solid contender
in the already saturated video card marketplace by
offering an Ultra powered video card
for a little less cash.
At the time of this review, X-Micro has not
made it clear what the MSRP of this card will be.
However, X-Micro does have a history of
selling their cards at extremely competitive
prices. With
that said, I believe it?s safe to say that if
you?re in the market for an Ultra and
were thinking of buying a card from a better known
company, you?d be able to pick up this baby and
have some cash left over to get some other
goodies. Let?s
take a look and see if this would be money well
spent, shall we?
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| Specifications
Of The X-Micro Impact 4 Ultra |
| It's a reference
board...but do you care! |
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Powered by NVIDIA's latest high-end 3D graphics processor (latest 2nd generation
GPU):
- GeForce2 Ultra
- Optimized for DDR memory
- Optimized graphics card design and improved stability thanks to
RAM heat sinks
Chipset:
- Nvidia GeForce2 Ultra
- RAMDAC - 350MHz
- Default Core Speed - 250MHz
- Available for AGP Only
- Supported API(s)OpenGL & Direct3D
- DVC Support - No
- TwinView Support - No
- Memory Amount 64MB of 460MHZ DDR RAM
- Bandwidth - 7.36GB/S
- 4 dual-texturing pipelines
- 8 texels per clock cycle
- 31.25 million triangles mapped per second
- 4X AGP with Fast Writes support
- AGP 2X compatible
- NVIDIA Shading Rasterizer
- Most advanced 3D functions
- Optimized support for OpenGL® (Silicon Graphics) and DirectX® 7 (Microsoft®) APIs
- Cube environmental mapping
- Bump mapping
- Vertex blending
- Projective textures
- Texture compression
- Lighting
- Shading
- Hardware Full Scene Anti-Aliasing
(FSAA)
- Hardware Transform & Lighting Engines (T&L)
- Resolutions up to 2048x1536 in 16 million colors
TV/Video Output for playback of DVD titles or games on your television:
- NTSC and PAL TV output in 640x480and 800x600
- DVI-Output for high resolution display on digital monitors
- Play DVD-Video on your PC with PowerDVD?
System Requirements:
- Pentium® II / AMD K6® and higher or compatible
- Available AGP slot
- 64MB RAM
- 10MB hard disk space (More to install games)
- CD-ROM or DVD-ROM drive
- Microsoft Windows® 95 OSR2, Windows 98 and higher
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The X-Micro Impact
4 Ultra comes with an installation manual, a CD
that contains the necessary drivers for the card
as well as some additional software.
One thing I must point out that is a bit of
a nuisance is the grammar in the installation
manual.
Although I think the novice user will be
able to work with it, the manual is full of
misspellings and other errors that are borderline
comical.
The following
software titles are included on the drivers disk:
Power DVD 2.55, Power VCD 95, and
Powerstrip 2.27.
If you are looking for a good Software DVD
player, I think that Power DVD is worth a look.
Although I have the newer version 3, I can
say that version 2.55 has performed exceptionally
well for me.
For those of you who may not be familiar
with it, Powerstrip is a third party video card
utility that is choc-full of features.
In a nutshell, this utility let?s you
change just about every video related setting
imaginable and yes it provides an over-clocking
feature too.
I was a little disappointed to see that
they included Power VCD 95 though.
This may have been a good video player in
its day but that was six years ago.
Oh well, I guess two out of three ain?t
bad.
Based on excellent
hardware specifications and a mediocre compliment
of software and documentation, I give the X-Micro
Impact 4 Ultra a Specification/Features rating of 8.
Quality
and Design
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