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Undoubtedly the GeForce2 MX series of graphics cards are bestseller all over the world. I doubt there is a video card manufacturer not using the GeForce2 MX chips in it's own cards. In other worlds you'll find a lot of such cards made by worldunknown manufacturers like I-CHANCE as well as very known ones like ASUStek. In this articles I'll take a look over product of middle-ranked company.

InnoVISION Multimedia is not a new company, but got more famous just about a year ago. Characteristic of Inno3D (Trade mark of InnoVISION Multimedia) is their aggressive Products line offering products based on super low-end chips (Trident Blade 3D, Blade XP; SiS 315) and in the same time super high-end cards based on NVIDIA's GeForce2 Ultra and GeForce3. By the way, Inno3D is still selling Savage2000 based video cards, but in very limited number. Yes, they are also making KYRO I and KYRO II cards, but they got famous with their NVIDIA based video cards.

What's Inside?

Inno3D GeForce2 MX 400 32MB TwinView TV-Out arrived in retail package, inside of which I found User's Manual, S-Video to RCA adapter and Inno3D's MegaPack Bundle. Value versions of these cards includes the same retail package, but the MegaPack Bundle is missing. Well, let's take a look what I found inside:

As the card's name says this board has not only TwinView but TV-Output. Board's color is the usual one for most Taiwanese manufacturers. 4x8MB EliteMT chips are installed on the front side of side of the Inno3D GeForce2 MX TwinView TV-Out. The TV encoder used in this MX is not the widely used Conexant Bt868. Inno3D has decided to put active cooling over the chip, because it's getting hot. Note that some MX products of other companies like ABIT, Gainward and Gigabyte have only passive cooling so this is only a plus. Of course there are models with it. Now let's take a look over the board:

In the fact this picture is not exactly of the same card I have reviewed, but there are only one difference - absence of TV-Output. It's time to show you how the drivers look like. By the way, I used NVIDIA Detonator drivers version 12.90 for Win9x/ME.

This is the overclocking panel who will let you change memory and core's clocks. If this panel is missing start Regedit and go there:

When you are already there hold your mouse' right button over "coolbits" and click on "modify". Then as value data add "3". Close it and go check you're driver panel. If there is no "Clock Frequencies" panel even after restart your driver doesn't seem to support this feature.

There is a small app in the drivers, which if enabled stays in the tray and gives you quick access to the most important panels.

I have tested the TV-Out using my 21" Samsung Hitron Black television. Image quality was almost equal to Diamond Viper II's TV-Out quality. Almost equal because the image was a bit darker. Fortunately the drivers will allow you to fix this "problem".

Trying to offer more to It's loyal buyers NVIDIA has got Matrox's Dual Head and S3's DuoView for example and developed analog called TwinView. Would be wrong if we expect the quality of Dual Head, but thanks to NVIDIA now this technology is more popular than ever, because almost every company producing GeForce2 MX cards. Inno3D offers quality image on both screens (used 19" Hansol 900P as main monitor and 15" Hansol 501P as secondary). Unfortunately in the Win9x/ME drivers, version 12.90 for some strange reason you won't see most of the functions. Thing were quite different under Windows 2000 with drivers version 14.20. Under this OS the full functionality of TwinView showed up.

In Horizontal Spam the left part of the desktop is on the left monitor, and the right part on the right one.

In Vertical Spam the upper part of the desktop appears on the first monitor, and lower on the other.

This panel gives access to screen adjustment options of the selected monitor.

This was the highest resolution available for the second device, even though it was capable of 1280x1024 at 60Hz.

Lately I had the unique opportunity to test MSI's GeForce2 MX accelerator MS-818 with TV-Out and frankly I was extremely disappointed from the offered 2D Quality (maybe I got defective unit). Fortunately Inno3D behaved a lot better, but worse compared to ATi Radeon and Diamond Viper II.

I have no remarks on 3D quality in the tested games, but unfortunately I encountered some troubles. First, I was couldn't play Moto Racer 1 - some old game, but great in its genre. When start a race you'll see no other things, but lap's background. You are controlling the motor, can hear the sound of the engine, crashes, etc, but will notice only this image:

I have tried different drivers - 12.90, 12.41, 5.33, but with no success. I've been happy to find that Moto Racer 2 work just fine with the GeForce2 MX 400. By the way Moto Racer 3 is in process of development :) A problem with UT exist if FSAA is enabled, but for this - later. The next problem was Quake 3: Arena's sky only when using Q3Bench Normal settings no matter if FSAA is enabled or disabled. High and Max Settings are OK. It's one color only and the clouds are not available:

FSAA just removes edges of the screen and makes picture clearer and smooth. This is because when enabled the GeForce2 internally renders the frames using higher resolution. Max FSAA screen resolution is 1024x768. Unfortunately FSAA enabling kills your cards performance :( However, the difference between T&L and FSAA is that you can use FSAA even with old games.

Due the fact the we have factory overclocked memory (from 166 to 185MHz) found on Inno3D's Tornado GeForce2 MX 400 TwinView TV Out the overclocking potential is not as high as I wish. In the summer heat the 5ns memory chips passed 196MHz with no problems, but at 200MHz there are some visual glitches (artefacts). In other words the difference between the the standard memory clock of a GeForce2 MX 400 (166MHz) and the achieved by overclock 196MHz makes no less and no more than 30MHz. Same is with the core (working at the standard 200MHz). The problems started after I tried to clock the card above 130Mhz. At 140MHz the computer started freezing frequently. So as a stable clock I will define 230MHz. 'Is the overclocking useful" question will get answer by the next tests.

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