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Posted by
Toby Crundwell
on August 09, 2001
Company: Abit
Product: Siluro
MX400
 Abit
has become something of a brand name, and has built up a lot
of respect from computer enthusiasts. Although mainly known
for their motherboards, Abit have started to push out
GeForce graphics cards, under the name of "Siluro".
Today at 3D Spotlight, we are looking at the MX400 version
of this product line.
nVidia's rapid product cycles have
resulted in a restructuring of the GeForce 2 family. The MX
is now replaced with the MX400, the GTS has been replaced
with the Pro, and nVidia have also released another budget
chip in the MX200. The MX200 and the MX400 would
theoretically straddle the original MX. nVidia hopes to
emulate the success of the original MX card in these two new
versions of the budget line. The MX 200 is a "budget
budget" 3D gaming card, reminiscent of the TNT2 vanta
card (but much more powerful of course), in direct
competition to ATI's Radeon VE and Matrox's G450. The MX400
is more of a "performance budget" 3D gaming card.
Both of the new MX chips use the same MX chipset, which only
uses two pipelines to process textures, unlike the four
which all other GeForce2 cards have.
The card
The MX400 is almost identical to the
original MX, apart from the chip speed which has been upped
from 175 MHz to 200 MHz the VRAM has been doubled in size.
This means you can now get a 64 Mb card on a low budget,
which is quite amazing seeing as some computers being sold
today have that amount of system memory. The main advantage
of the MX400 over the MX is the increased Texel rate, which
has increased by 14% to 800 Million per second. However
memory bandwidth, the main bottleneck on GeForce cards, is
unchanged at 2.7 Gb per second. The MX400 chip is the same
0.18 micron that is found on the original MX. MX400 cards
can either be fitted with 128 bit SDR memory or the slightly
slower 64 bit DDR memory. Its good to see that Abit has gone
with the former, unlike Creative have done. 128 bit adds to
the price slightly, but it is worth having it for an extra
performance boost. Be aware though that Abit's MX200 cards
only come with 64 bit memory though.
The Specifications
-
 AGP
2X /4X Support, AGP texturing, Fast Writes Support.
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Integrated 350 MHz RAMDAC,
resolution up to 2048 x 1536 @ 75 Hz
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200 MHz core clock, 400 million
pixels/sec, 800 million texel/sec fill rate, Over 20
million triangles/sec
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2.7Gb/sec memory bandwidth
-
Second generation transform and
lighting T&L engines
-
DirectX, OpenGL Optimisations
support and S3 texture compression
-
32-bit Z-stencil buffer
-
High-Definition Video Professor
(HDTV) for Full-screen Video playback of 720p and DVD
resolution.
-
Advanced support for DirectDraw
-
Hardware colour space conversion (YUV
4:2:2 and 4:2:0)
-
5-tap horizontal by 3-tap vertical
filtering
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8:1 up scaling and downscaling
-
Per-pixel colour keying
-
0.18 micron
-
Multiple video windows with hardware
colour space conversion and filtering
-
DVD sub-picture alpha blended
composition
-
Optional TV-Out (T200 model only)
-
Video acceleration for DirectShow,
MPEG-1, MPEG-2
-
Complete implementation of DX5/6/7
hardware and meets all the requirements of mainstream PC
graphics, including Microsoft's PC00, PC99 and PC99a
initiatives.
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