Leadtek WinFast GeForce2 MX
Founded in 1986, Leadtek Corporation has left
nothing but good impressions over the past few years with their quality video
boards. They specialize in the design and manufacturing of a wide range of
high performance graphics, computer mainboards and now high-end video conferencing
products. To fallow up with our recent Leadtek GeForce 2 GTS review, we look
at their latest GeForce MX based card.
It is a GPU
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Features
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The
Package
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- Nvidia
2nd-generatioin 256-bit GPU with new Hypertexel architecture ( 4 texels
per clock )
- 32MB
on-board memory
- 20M
Triangles/sec through T&L and Set-up ,
- 700-Megatexel
fill rate Full acceleration for Microsoft DirectX 7 and OpenGL
- 1.2
ICD DirectX Texture Compression & S3TC support Comprehensive AGP 4X
support with fast writes and execute mode
- Integrated
350MHz RAMDAC, resolution up to 2048x1536, True Color @ 60Hz
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Nvidia would like everyone to know right up front
is that they no longer call their unit’s video cards. They like the term GPU
and that stands for Graphic Processing Unit. It is no coincidence that the
term GPU closely resembles to CPU. Nvidia would like to make it plainly obvious
that their video cards move much of the load of graphic rendering off the
CPU and onto the GPU. While the original GeForce chipset did a good job of
improving performance with this approach, it became obvious that higher core
clock speeds and memory performance were necessary to keep improving performance.
You can only push a core speed so far though, and it took a move to the .18
micron architecture of the MX chipset to keep improving performance. Avid
overclockers already know that a move to a smaller architecture has immediate
benefits can be added in the same space, but that lower heat production is
also a benefit.
As you might already know, the MX chipset is the little brother of the original
GeForce 2 GTS card. Both are based on the same core. With Nvidia’s 6-Month
cycle, they currently own the high-end 3d Acceleration market and this with
very little "serious" competition, at this moment anyway. Not all
people can afford to spend 250$USD+ every six months to have the latest and
fastest 3D Accelerator on the market. At the same time, not everybody will
opt for a 250$USD+ video card at all. Just a few months ago, Nvidia Corporation
seriously analyzed the situation.
In June 2000, a month after the GeForce2 GTS release, they introduced a new
product for the other crowd that was asking an affordable 3D accelerator featuring
superior quality than its competition for a competing price. All of this takes
us back to June 28TH, 2000; the release of a low cost 3D accelerator
based on the GeForce2 GTS architecture, selling almost half less than the
GTS card with the same amount of memory.
