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Technical Impressions
Leadtek respected Nvidia’s reference design, meaning
that a reasonable amount of the PCB will remain unused, the consumer will
end up pay the extra for that. An interesting feature worth mentioning is
that Leadtek decided to manufacture the card with a heatsink/fan combo; overclockers
will be the ones that will really benefit of this.
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Main
View of the Card
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Overclocking
With its .18 core process, overclocking is without questions a very interesting
tweak for the MX chipset. The reference design it self doesn’t even require
a heatsink to run, however most companies decided to include one for the ones
that will be planning to clock the chipset higher than its official stock speed.
Leadtek included a FAN/HEATISNK combo in order to give further interest to overclockers.
Our review sample had no problems running at a 210MHz-core speed, and 200MHz
without heatsink attached. We performed a 12Hour Quake III loop, and the results
were successful. Going beyond 210MHz simply makes the card unstable. As for
the memory, we easily pushed it to 207MHz, here again we performed a 12hour
Quake III Loop, and results were again a success. I was personally very satisfied
with its overclocking results for this 150$ USD product. 6.0 Ns memory was present
on the board.
Video Features
The GeForce2 MX chipset features more than just downgrades over its bigger brother
the GTS and its cousin the GeForce 256. Nvidia decided to implant an interesting
video feature (TwinView). TwinVideo may already sound a little bit familiar
to some. This is a very similar if almost not identical feature to Matrox’s
DualHead Technology. It allows the user to have multiple video outputs at once.
You have the choice of using a Digital Flat Panel (DFP), CRT and/or a simple
TV Out feature. Our review sample did not have the (DFP) Module on board, so
we were not able to drive it through our LCD Displays. However, we did get the
chance to test it with a 32" SONY Wega TV and the results were acceptable,
similar to matrox’s G400 output. As Tom’s
Hardware Already stated earlier this month, Nvidia’s Twin View Technology
has a lot of growing to do compared to Matrox’s Dual Head. Moreover, we could
not agree more. We experienced the exact same problems that our colleague at
Tom’s Hardware experienced. We were not able to play a DVD movie on the second
output; the screen was either purple or the player it self was crashing every
time and a few other glitches were present in the drivers. At this moment, Dual
Head technology featured on G400 and G450 cards remain the top solution for
the ones planning to run on twin configurations. Note that you will not be able
to use two CRT’s with this specific leadtek product, because it only features
an S-video output.
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