NVIDIA GeForce2 MX cards have been selling nearly
a year already, and their prices have dropped so significantly that
these cards has become very popular. There are a lot of versions
of these products: a wide range of frequencies, a trimmed memory
exchange bus. You may also notice a cheap trick of installation
of 64 MBytes video memory on such cards. When a graphics processor
chokes with lack of the memory bandwidth on its rated modes, then
it doesn't need such volume of this slow memory. But such a super-size
of the RAM is preferable for the marketing. It is better to set
more memory but not the cheapest which hardly works on its rated
frequencies. Now even GeForce2 MX200 cards are equipped with the
same size of 64 MB! A card which is capable to work a maximum of
the speed of Riva TNT2Pro, for which a 32-bit color is useless,
is given a 64 MBytes RAM!
Thanks God there are rational ideas and rational
realizations. As you know the fastest among GeForce2 MX's is GeForce2
MX400. And such a memory size will suit only these cards. Many companies
have taken exactly this way, for example, Leadtek has no one MX400
with 32 MBytes of memory, so does ABIT, which now produces not only
mainboards but also a series of video cards named Siluro.
Some time ago we already examined one of the MX
cards from this company. ABIT Computer releases new models not often.
But the company didn't refuse to produce new MXs, and today we are
dealing with one of MX200/MX400 solutions from ABIT.
Card
The ABIT Siluro T400 card has AGP x2/x4 interface,
64 MBytes SDR SDRAM located in 8 chips on the right side of the
PCB.
EliteMT produces the memory chips with a 6 ns access
time which corresponds to 166 MHz. The memory works right at this
frequency. I've already mentioned that for such size of RAM the
manufacturers equip their cards with a slower memory at the expense
of its operation speed. It is known that for MX400 cards NVIDIA
recommends 200/183 MHz. But we are coming across such situation
the second time already (the first was connected with the Leadtek
WinFast GeForce2 MX MAX) and again you can see that the MX400
is equipped not with 5.5 ns but with 6 ns memory.
The design is rather simple, the PCB is dark brown.
On the card you can find a TV-out with a S-Video connector, but
the card is supplied with an S-Video-to-RCA adapter, that is why
if your video equipment has no S-Video connectors, you can use the
TV-out.
A passive heat sink with plate fins is attached
to the GPU. It seems that the ABIT's engineers are not afraid of
overheating of the GeForce2 MX400, which works at a higher frequency
than a usual GeForce2 MX (the ABIT Siluro MX had yet an active heat
sink).
The card ships in a bag-shaped Retail package,
where you can find:
- User Manual;
- CD with drivers and utilities;
- soft DVD-player;
- S-Video extender;
- S-Video-to-RCA adapter.
Overclocking
The ABIT Siluro T400 was overclocked up to 240/210
MHz. It is not a record among similar cards, but it is not a fault
of the card: the drivers are to be blamed. Unfortunately, all latest
versions of the Detonators do not detect correctly a frequency the
memory operates at if 16-bit chips are used to provide the required
size (either 4 pieces for the MX200 cards or 8 pcs for the MX400
cards with 64 MBytes of RAM). The user receives a double frequency
as if DDR memory is installed. As a result, overclocking of the
memory is severely limited, and even the latest version of the RivaTuner
doesn't allow jumping over 400, i.e. 200 MHz for the memory. Only
the utility coming with the video card (Graphic MAX) can help in
reaching of 210 MHz. By the way, this error is corrected in the
new version of the Graphic MAX, where a user can see real frequencies.
It should be noted, however, that 210 MHz is a
good result for 6 ns memory. But taking into consideration that
memory from EliteMT always had an excellent overclocking potential,
I wish the software had allowed lifting the frequency some more.
Installation and drivers
Test system configuration:
- CPU: Intel Pentium III 1000 MHz:
- MB: ABIT 6OJV (i815);
- RAM: 256 MBytes PC133;
- HDD: IBM DPTA 20 GBytes;
- OS: Windows 98 SE;
- Monitors: ViewSonic P810 (21") and ViewSonic P817 (21").
In the tests we used the NVIDIA v.12.60 drivers,
S3TC was enabled, VSync was disabled.
For the comparative analyses we used the results
of the SUMA Platinum GeForce2 MX400 PowerUp video card (200/183
MHz).
Test results
The 2D graphics shows nothing to make me angry.
As you might remember,
the previous Abit's card on the NVIDIA GeForce2 MX had far not excellent
image quality. Here the image is marvelous up to 1280X1024X100 Hz.
But the quality depends not only a manufacturer of a video card,
but also on a definite sample.
For estimation of the performance in the 3D we
used an id Software Quake3 v.1.17 test which demonstrates the card's
operation in the OpenGL with a standard demo002 benchmark used.
Quake3 Arena
demo002
The test was carried out in two modes: Fast (in
16-bit color) and High Quality (in 32-bit color).
The ABIT Siluro T400 performs not worse than its
competitor, and overclocking makes the definite contribution.
Conclusion
It is an ordinary card of the GeForce2 MX400 class,
which is equipped with excessive memory. On the other hand, the
card has high-quality memory, ships in an attractive box and costs
not much than many noname cards of this class.
For the complete comparison characteristics of
video cards of this and other classes refer to our 3Digest.
Highs:
- Good performance in 3D graphics;
- Excellent product implementation quality;
- Traditional for ABIT Retail-package;
- TV-out.
Lows:
- Slow 166 MHz (6 ns) memory instead of the recommended NVIDIA
183 MHz (5.5 ns).
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