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Date |
: Jul 11th, 2001 |
| Category |
: Video |
| Manufacturer |
: ABIT |
| Author |
: Jin-Wei Tioh |
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The Siluro MX400's packaging is rather unique, but aesthetically pleasing. You get the Siluro, a well written user manual, as well as a CD with the drivers and a registered copy of WinDVD 2000.
ABIT chose to follow nVIDIA's specified reference design. There's absolutely nothing wrong with this, as their reference designs are quite good. The first thing that jumps out at you is that the Siluro uses a black PCB. While having no bearing on performance, ABIT wants to let you frag and look good doing it. However, there is something odd. The Siluro utilizes passive cooling for the GeForce2 MX400 core. Granted, it is a larger than usual heatsink, but most manufacturers provide an active cooling solution even for their GeForce2 MX products. We'll take a look at what impacts this has later in the article. On a note of interest, ABIT did not include the two mounting holes needed to use coolers such as the ThermalTake Blue Orb. If you do want to mount another heatsink/cooler on the Siluro, you would have to use some form of thermal adhesive.
Another point of interest is that the Siluro MX400 is outfitted with 64MB of SDR RAM. The Siluro uses eight 6ns EliteMT chips to achieve this capacity. This amount of RAM used to be a luxury item, but in recent months, the price of 6ns (166MHz) SDR RAM has fallen steadily as faster DDR RAM becomes the norm, to the point where it is finally feasible for manufacturers to use 64MB on a card.
Since this is the Siluro MX400 and not the Siluro T400, TV-out
functionality is not present. On the T400, TV-out functionality is provided by the popular Conexant (Brooktree) BT869KRF chip. However, you can clearly see that the silk screening for the required hardware is already there on the MX400.
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