SUMMARY: For those who are on a budget but still want passable graphics quality, the GeForce2 MX400 has been the card of choice. Abit has decided to enter this arena, and Sov has tested their Abit Siluro GF2MX400 video card to let you know whether it can stand up to the competition. So come on in and join the fun.
Below is a table showing just a few of the differences between the Geforce2 MX chipsets that are currently available.
We can see there isn’t much difference in memory bandwidth or memory setup between the original MX1 and the MX400. The only real difference here is a faster core clock. The Geforce2 MX200, however, is a different story. The maximum memory buffer has been lowered to 32MB and the bit rate has been sliced from 128bit to 64bit, leaving one huge gap in performance. Looks like the GF2 MX200 is going to be another TNT2M64.
Features of the ABIT Siluro GF2 MX400
The photo above shows the new power behind the ABIT Siluro GF2 MX400. Using the new nVidia GF2 MX400 chipset, the ABIT Siluro runs at a default core speed of 200MHz. While the original GF2 MX specifications didn’t require a heatsink for the chipset, we are now running the MX400 at overclocked speeds. ABIT has followed nVidia’s new specifications and added a rather large green passive cooling heatsink to the GPU. Unfortunately, it is only applied by frag tape and thus doesn’t get a very good thermal transfer. Clips and goo would have been more preferable, or a HSF combo would have been even nicer. Now that we have seen the core, lets take a look at the RAM.
The Siluro MX400 uses 8x8MB EliteMT 6ns SDR SDRAM modules for a total of 64MB of SDR SDRAM. These babies run at a default clock of 166MHz, but of course you can squeeze up to 200Mhz+ out of 6ns memory. These 6ns RAM chips are the same chips ABIT used on its original GF2 MX, so memory overclocking should be the same as the old ABIT GF2 MX...which was well above the rest of the pack last time.
Overclocking The ABIT Siluro GF2 MX400, despite already being an overclocked GF2MX chipset, was still surprisingly overclockable. Core speeds reached 212MHz and memory reached 221MHz in our testing. Rather excellent!
