by FastSite
07/31/2001 | 12:00 AM
Today the graphics card market is split into more or less stable price sectors, each of them offering enough models to satisfy almost every need. Of course, graphics cards from famous manufacturers are more expensive than their no-name counterparts. Still, there is cut-throat competition within these price sectors. It makes the manufacturers resort to all sorts of tricks to attract the users' attention.<%BANNER[article]%>
For NVIDIA GeForce2 MX 400 graphics cards these catchy traits are either non-standard core and memory frequencies or some accessory functions. Anyway, the manufacturers do their best to create something outstanding.
ABIT, a newcomer in the graphics "major league", tends to make extraordinary products, like its well-known mainboards, for instance. Well, not all of these innovations turn out to be a success, but this approach guarantees the arrival of more and more unique pieces.
This time our eye got caught by ABIT Siluro T400 64MB graphics card based on NVIDIA GeForce2 MX 400. As you'll see a bit later, this is a fine specimen from ABIT's collection of unusual products.
ABIT Siluro T400 64MB graphics card is designed on a fashionable black-lacquered textolite:
The card is equipped with NVIDIA GeForce2 MX 400 graphics chip and 64MB memory in 6ns microchips from EliteMT:
The first point to strike us was the absence of fixing holes for Thermaltake Blue Orb and similar coolers. A discouraging outcome is that the card has to be overclocked with the "native" heatsink alone. NVIDIA GeForce2 MX chip is equipped with a heatsink fixed on a sticky pad:
Though a passive heatsink combined with a pad like that are far not the best cooling solution for a graphics core, T400 reveals excellent overclockability: the core works well up to the frequency of 240MHz. It's one of the highest results among all the NVIDIA GeForce2 MX 400 based graphics cards we've ever seen. The only "but" is that we still had to use extra cooling:
The graphics memory demonstrated surprisingly high overclocking abilities as well: the card has pleased us with stable work at the top memory frequency of 240MHz. Moreover, the memory chips don't get overheated at all, so the heatsinks, which you can see on the previous photo, are simply of no use to install.
EliteMT is known for its quality memory chips, but 240MHz is too much for the chips intended for 166MHz at the most, isn't it? Perhaps, the situation at the memory market is so absurd that EliteMT has to mark 4.5ns and 5ns chips as 6ns ones... If so, we'd advise you to pay keen attention to graphics cards bundled with 6ns memory from EliteMT - it may turn out a lucky try. :)
Now let's get back to ABIT Siluro T400 64MB. It features CH7007A chip from Chrontel providing image output to the TV-Out. The package also includes an adapter for RCA and S-Video Outs:
We believe it's a wise solution: we tried both the S-Video and RCA Outs and saw splendid full-color graphics in both cases. Thus, you won't have to puzzle over any adapters for this graphics card:
The maximal resolution CH7007A chip supports is 800x600 pixels. At higher resolutions automatic TV screen panning mode is enabled. The graphics card supports the following TV standards: PAL B/D/G/H/I/M/N, NTSC.
The testing system was configured as follows:
The software used included:
We used Detonator 12.60 driver version.
We will compare ABIT Siluro T400 64MB with NVIDIA GeForce2 GTS based card equipped with 32MB graphics memory, ASUS V7700. We chose this particular card because we know that 32MB cards are the cheapest among all the NVIDIA GeForce2 GTS/Pro/Ultra graphics cards and their price is very close to that of the most expensive GeForce2 MX 400 based cards.
In Quake3 Arena for 16bit color mode we selected 16bit textures and 32bit textures for 32bit modes. The texture quality and details were set at the maximum, tri-linear filtering and texture compression were enabled. All the other settings were left by default. The tests were run in demo127 from Quake3 Point Release Patch 1.27g.
In 3DMark we selected 16bit textures and 16bit Z-buffer for 16bit color mode and 32bit textures with 24bit Z-buffer for 32bit mode.
We tested both these graphics cards in "D3D Hardware T&L" mode.
As you can see, in 16bit color mode an overclocked ABIT Siluro T400 64MB managed to reduce the gap between GeForce2 GTS and itself more than twice.
In 32bit color mode the same trend is observed, but at higher resolutions the performance gap between ABIT Siluro T400 64MB and NVIDIA GeForce2 GTS gets narrower. At 1600x1200x32 NVIDIA GeForce2 GTS is even slower because the frame buffer, Z-buffer and textures can't fit into its 32MB memory. So, the graphics card has to transfer the textures via AGP and to store them in the RAM.
ABIT Siluro T400 64MB fails to keep up with NVIDIA GeForce2 GTS - a pretty natural thing for graphics cards of different classes. However, ABIT Siluro T400 64MB rushes forward when it is overclocked and falls shortly at the back of NVIDIA GeForce2 GTS.
It is noteworthy that in 32bit color mode in Car Chase test ABIT Siluro T400 64MB proves faster than NVIDIA GeForce2 GTS even at nominal frequencies. The reason is probably the great amount of textures used in this test, that is why the card based on NVIDIA GeForce2 GTS with 32MB memory is forced to resort to AGP texturing.
ABIT Siluro T400 64MB provides perfect image quality: we noticed no blurring up to the resolution of 1280x1024.
The TV-Out has all the features typical of NVIDIA GeForce2 MX based cards with TV-Out.
Device Settings - TV format change:
Device Adjustment - screen positioning, flicker filter, brightness and contrast adjustment:
Device Settings - gamma adjustment:
ABIT Siluro T400 64MB is a really high-quality product offered at a reasonable price. Thanks to high-quality components used on it, this graphics card sports remarkable overclockability. A distressing point is that T400 doesn't offer the possibility to install an effective cooler, and it was a real puzzle for us why a card with such impressive overclockability is equipped with nothing more but just a passive heatsink.
Other features of ABIT Siluro T400 64MB are out of criticism. So, we think it deserves being called one of the best representatives of the MX family.
Highs:
Lows: