ABIT Siluro GeForce2 MX 400 Video Card

Company: ABIT
Products: GeForce2 MX 400 Video Card
Street Price: ~$75
Date Reviewed: October 13, 2001
Reviewed By: Jason

Testing & Benchmarks:

The base system consisted of the following:

• ABIT KT7A-RAID w/Latest Beta Bios
• AMD Athlon 1.4GHz
• 256MB RAM @ CAS2
• 3Com EtherLink III NIC
• Western Digital 20GB HD
• Windows 98SE w/Latest Patches Applied
• VIA 4-in-1 v4.32
• NVIDIA WHQL Detonator Drivers v12.41 (These were used to maintain consistency with the previous benchmarks)

3DMark 2001:

For testing in 3DMark 2001, I combined the GF2MX 400's results with the numbers from the previous video card review using the GF3 & GF2GTS. The ABIT Siluro GF2MX 400 ran at a stock speed of 200MHz Core / 166MHz Memory, and overclocked it ran at 240MHz Core / 230MHz Memory. I imagine I could squeeze a little more out of it if some active cooling was placed on the GPU and some RAMSinks on the memory.

 I ran 4 sets of tests to try and see how much overclocking the CPU vs overclocking the video card affected overall 3DMark performance. The CPU was run at 1.4 GHz (stock speed) and then overclocked to 1.6GHz. The VisionTek GF3 was ran at stock speeds (200MHz Core / 460MHz Memory), then overclocked to 230MHz Core & 500MHz Memory. The Creative Labs GeForce2 GTS was ran at stock speed too (200MHz Core / 333MHz Memory), then overclocked to 240MHz core and 385MHz Memory.

Hopefully all this won't confuse anyone, this is the only test where all these variations are performed, if I did it for all of them it would just be way too much information and only confuse and distort what is trying to be demonstrated.

ABIT GF2MX 1.4GHz Stock	ABIT GF2MX 1.6GHz Stock	ABIT GF2MX 1.4GHz OCed	ABIT GF2MX 1.6GHz OCed
VisionTek GF3 1.4GHz Stock	VisionTek GF3 1.6GHz Stock	VisionTek GF3 1.4GHz OCed	VisionTek GF3 1.6GHz OCed
GF2GTS 1.4GHz Stock	GF2GTS 1.6GHz Stock	GF2GTS 1.4GHz OCed	GF2GTS 1.6GHz OCed

Again, overclocking the CPU yielded almost no performance gain, however overclocking the video card increased our 3DMark score by about 800 points! Keep in mind that the GF2MX 400 only has a stock memory bandwidth of 2.7GB/s and a GF3 has 7.36GB/s!!!

Vulpine GLMark:

Vulpine GLMark is another great benchmarking program, which instead of testing by overclocking the CPU & video cards, I decided to run the tests at 1.4GHz (stock CPU speed), and run the video cards at their stock speeds. GLMark does give the option to run the tests with GeForce3 features (if you have a GF3), Advanced Features, or Standard OpenGL 1.2. I ran the GeForce3 twice, once selecting the GeForce3 Features, and a second time selecting just the Standard OpenGL 1.2. For the GeForce2 cards I ran just Standard OpenGL 1.2 as to give an accurate comparison against the GeForce3.

All the cards had pretty much a linear degradation in performance as the resolution increased. However the GF2MX 400 did beat the GF2GTS at 1600x1200, the only reason I can attribute this to is because of the extra 32MB of RAM on the card to store the textures. Depending on what games you play or programs you use, 64MB cards will show better performance against a 32MB equivalent at different resolutions, it all just depends on how complex the video scene is.

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