Abit Siluro MX400 Review - PAGE 1

ABIT is well known for their motherboards which almost always sport sweet overclocking capabilities and great stability. This reputation for high quality products also applies to their peripherals and other components. Like many other motherboard manufacturers, ABIT is more than just mobos, producing a range of PCB based devices.

The Geforce2 MX 400 has replaced the original MX chip in NVIDIA’s line of Geforce2 products. Paired with the MX 200, which is considered the “low-end” MX chip, the MX 400 is slightly pumped up from its predecessor. It is still based on the Geforce2 GTS chip (with the same limitations as well -- featuring only two of the GTS’ four rendering pipelines and having with half of its memory bandwidth, read more about it in our review of the Gigabyte GF1280) and as we saw in previous reviews, the Geforce2 MX in all its incarnations is thoroughly memory bandwidth starved. This, in fact, is NVIDIA’s tactic for distancing the economic MX family from the beefy prices of the GTS and up. The Geforce2 MX 400 does, however, also feature 64MB of RAM which is twice that of previous MX cards.

Despite its short comings though, Geforce2 MX based cards are extremely cheap, yet still fairly powerful and the ABIT Siluro MX 400 is no exception. Here are the specs for this card.

Specs

The core speed of the MX 400 is 25MHz greater than that of the older MX cards. This is fine and dandy, although more or less useless when the memory bandwidth limitations are factored into the equation. If the memory wasn’t able to provide enough data to the core when it was running at 175MHz, a core running at 200MHz isn’t going to do much better. The extra 32MB of RAM is a nice touch though but we’ll have to wait to see how this plays out in the benchmarks. The rest of the features are standard for the MX line so I will move on from here.

Box Contents

• Manual
• Driver CD
• The Card

ABIT has stuck with the basics in the box contents and, as usual, they have done a very good job of it. I am speaking mostly about the manual which is the most thorough video card manual you will probably ever see (other than the ones made for extremely high end 3D rendering dealies :] ). With detailed diagrams and screenshots of just about every screen you’ll see during configuration, this manual doesn’t leave anything to chance for the inexperienced end user - it even covers the BIOS flashing process.

The CD includes the necessary drivers to get up and running (although, their website is the best place to check for the latest drivers) as well as a complimentary copy of WinDVD. And that’s it for the box contents. Oh, I should mention though, that the box itself is pretty swass. It’s triangular self is quite funky, albeit useless once the card is installed :p

Installation

The installation of the ABIT Siluro Geforce2 MX 400 went just as you expect of any Geforce2 card - without a hitch. Uninstall the old drivers; shutdown to swap cards; boot up to navigate through the “New Hardware Found” wizard; reboot once again and you’re gold.