Infobox

Product Reviewed: PowerGene Geforce2 MX w/ TV-OUT (CMX2S-TV) Product Page Manufacturer: PowerColor Home Page Suggested Retail Price: $159 USD

As mentioned before, the Geforce2 MX chip is just like a crippled Geforce2 GTS. Running at a lower clock speed and with only a fraction of the rendering pipelines, the Geforce2 MX has theoretical performance at the level of the Geforce256. The advantage that the Geforce2 MX has over the Geforce256, though, is that it includes all of the features that the Geforce2 GTS has, such as the second-generation hardware T&L engine and the new NVIDIA Shading Rasterizer--it also has a nice feature called TwinView.

TwinView allows the graphics to be displayed on 2 different devices, such as a monitor and a TV (through a TV-OUT connector, or vice-versa) or 2 monitors. Basically, it's NVIDIA's answer to Matrox's dual-head display. I haven't seen many cards out there take advantage of TwinView, though, except for the PowerColor PowerGene Geforce2 MX card that we received and are review here.

Most Geforce2 MX cards that I've seen are very small, but this PowerColor card was the same size as the Geforce2 GTS card. The cooling for the card was also the same heatsink and fan that the Geforce2 GTS card used. Because of the slower core clock speed, the Geforce2 MX card already runs very cool and doesn't even require a form of active cooling such as a fan. Most manufacturers with Geforce2 MX products only use a heatsink, but kudos to PowerColor for adding the fan there, which makes this card more appealing to the overclocking crowd.

As mentioned before, this card is one of the few that takes advantage of the TwinView feature. The card that we received included a TV-OUT function and used the popular Booktree 868 controller for this function. It also included connectors for both S-Video and composite cables for those people who have older TV's.

The card included 32MB of Samsung 6ns SDR SD-RAM.

Inside the box, PowerColor included the driver CD, manual booklet, the same 2 games that came with the Geforce2 GTS card, a newer version of Intervideo's soft-DVD player, WinDVD 2000, and a composite video cable (more on this later).

As before, the manual was very much in-depth and also included a section in Chinese.

The drivers that came with the card included NVIDIA's Detonator 5.22 drivers. Also included on the CD was PowerColor's own tweaking software that allows you to access some of card's functions (such as core speed). Speaking of core speed, it was set to 175MHz and the memory was set to 166MHz, exactly what NVIDIA's specifications call for.

I would like to point out that I noticed that the display was a tad blurry at higher resolutions. I run my screen at 1152x864 and I noticed that the display was blurry at this resolution. Setting it down to 1024x768 cleared up this blurriness, but this is something to keep in mind if you're planning to plug a large monitor into this card.

TV-Output Performance
The TV-OUT feature was just superb. Using NVIDIA's TwinView technology, I was able to plug in a TV and either use it as the main display device or as the secondary device. Furthurmore, NVIDIA's drivers also allowed me to either extend the desktop or display a completely duplicate image on the second display device. The first mentioned feature works with and much like Windows 98/2000's multi-display feature, while the latter is excellent for making presentations (or, in my case, showing off my Quake 3 skills to friends on my 50" big-screen TV =)).

The Booktree processor used on this card for TV-OUT displayed very bright images--if not, a little too bright; however, a little adjustment on the TV changed that. Output was quite clear in both 640x480 and 800x600, the only resolutions that are available. These 2 resolutions, however, are probably the only resolutions that you would want to run your TV at, mainly because of the blurriness of the display for all TV's and that anything smaller will make the display so blurry that you won't know what's going on. The composite cable that was included with the package did the job of connecting the TV to the computer, but as soon as I switched it for an S-video cable that I had lying around, the display was much clearer and flickering was reduced considerably. It would have been nice if PowerColor had included an S-video cable in this scenario instead of the composite, or both, if they want to address compatibility issues with older TV sets.

Specifications

• nVIDIA 2nd Generation T&L, 256-bit GeForce2 MX GPU.
• Provides up to 700-Mtexels Fill Rate & 20M triangles/sec setup.
• Order independent Full Scene Multi-sample Anti-aliasing.
• 32-bit color with 32-bit z/stencil for better images quality in high-fidelity 3D applications.
• DirectX and S3TC texture compression.
• Support multi-texturing, Hardware bump mapping (Embossing, Dot Product3 & EMBM), light maps, reflection maps, Full-Scene Hardware Anti-Aliasing (HW FSAA), trilinear and 8-tap anisotropic filtering.
• Multi-buffering (double, triple, quad buffering) for smooth animation and video playback.
• Multiple video windows with hardware color space conversion and filtering.
• BRDF (Bidirectional Reflectance Distribution Function) support Video acceleration for Direct Show and MPEG-1, MPEG-2, and Indeo.
• Supports hardware effects, such as: Motion Blur, Depth of Field via D3D8.
• Full support of DXTC and S3TC via DX and OpenGL correspondingly.
• Supports the large textures for photo-realistic quality.
• TV-OUT integrated (optional)

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