[Review] Inno3D Tornado Geforce2 MX400 PCI

polabear / polabear@technoa.co.kr
 

Intro

The best graphic chip in 2000 is NV11(code name), NVIDIA made people to be fascinated by GeForce2 MX with good performance and pretty price! and stable driver support. so, now there is no enemy of GeForce2 MX in the world.

but, in 2001, ATI shows RADEON LE and STM shows KYRO series. and they started kicking ass of GeForce2 MX. after that, NVIDIA changed it's strategy for GeForce2 MX. it's separation of GeForce2 MX.

as a result, GeForce2 MX replace it position to GeForce2 MX 400 and TNT2 for value is gone to GeForce2 MX 200. and NVIDIA succeeded change of generation.

with a separation of GeForce 2 MX 400/200, some manufacturer tried to adopt new interface to GeForce 2 MX 400. in the past. we were able to see old interface on VOODOO 3. at first VOODOO 3 launched with AGP interface and after few month with PCI interface. however, there are no difference between AGP and PCI on VOODOO 3. it means VOODOO 3 just use AGP interface, not use full feature of AGP.

let see the difference between PC and AGP

Here you need to look carefully BUS Clock and Max Transfer Rate. especially AGP interface show more 8 times than PCI interface means PCI interface cant help showing bottleneck effect in processing of vast data, on the contrary AGP interface has no problem compared to PCI interface.

Now, i am delight that i show Tornado GeForce2 MC400 PCI to technoa members, it's PCI MX400.

Product Composition

 
Inno3D Tornado GeForce2 MX400 PCI
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 Inno3D Tornado package always show me full feature of bundle.

 
Provided Inno3D Tornado GeForce2 MX400 PCI Composition
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Provided User Manual is consist of 16 page in English. i can read a comparison of GeForce2 MX chipset and HardWare/SoftWare installation in this User Manual. User Manual are written with large character to be read easily.

As a bundle software. racing game called "Midnight GT" and "Rage Rally" i think you can watch some performance with Tornado GeForce2 MX 400

Installation CD Version is 1.4 and provided driver version is 4.12.01.0649 in 17th Nov 2000. plus 3D Mark 2000 Pro and DirectX 7.0

Layout

Tornado GeForce2 MX400 (PCI) layout is below.

Tornado GeForce2 MX400 PCI
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As you see, this VGA interface is PCI. and all same as normal VGA.

To emit the heat from GeForce2 MX 400, cooler is on the GeForce2 MX 400 chipset. no cooler need to GeForce2 MX graphic card when GeForce2 MX showed first in the market. it means there is no problem without cooler but Inno3D provide cooler.(No manufacturer provide it's GeForce2 MX card without cooler)

Cooler on Tornado GeForce2 MX400 PCI
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Let's see memory on Tornado GeForce2 MX 400, Winbond's 5ns memory were adopted on this card. adopting 5ns memory means 200MHz. so i expect it's can be overclocked to 200MHz on memory(you can see overclock ability on the next chapter)

Wibond 5ns SDRAM
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