The sample I received didn't come with TV-Out. It did
however come with active cooling, courtesy of an Evercool heatsink.fan combo,
that is thankfully also removable. Not that it performs badly or anything, but
the fact that it is removable, leaves some latitude for slapping blue orbs, or
some other hardcore cooling solution on, without having to break off an epoxy
setup. Since it was removable, and since I was going to do an evaluation of this
boards overclock potential, I pulled the heatsink fan off, and redid the thermal
interface, replacing the waxy film type of thermal compound with traditional
heatsink paste. This proved helpful further on.
The board is populated with Samsung 6ns RAM, 32megs in
all, which puts it comfortably at a stock memory clock of 166mhz. An interesting
feature of this board, one I haven't seen mentioned on other offerings (I may be
incorrect here) is an overclock jumper. At the stock settings the core and
memory run at 175/166mhz. At the overclock setting, it's 185/175. I assume this
feature was added to provide a means for the novice to do a basic overclock
without having to work real hard at it. It did offer a slight and noticeable
performance boost, but you know I'm going to have to go higher than that! :)
Insofar as "pack-in" materials, they are pretty basic
for this model. Like so many other of the Geforce2MX cards, the software bundle
is thin, consisting of drivers, and a software DVD player (PowerDVD 2.55). I
consider PowerDVD to be one of the best software based solutions available for
DVD decoding, so this is a good pack-in to have. The lack of pack-in games and
demo's shouldn't detract from this or any other card in this value oriented
segment. Besides, packins usually suck anyway. :)
My test's revolved around two popular benchmarks, Quake3
1.17 Demo001, and 3Dmark2000 v1.1 in order to give a decent showing to the
boards performance under two differing 3D API's (Direct3D, OpenGL).
My testbed system:
Aopen AX34-Pro-II Socket370 motherboard
128megs PC133 SDRAM
Windows Millennium OS, DirectX 7.1 (DirectX that ships with ME).
Chaintech's inbox drivers, version 6.23...
(yes, there is more hardware in the box.....but none relevant to testing....so why waste time telling you about it. :)