Abit's Siluro T400 / 64MB MX400
Gaming on a budget...

By, Marco Chiappetta
August 30, 2001

THE DRIVERS:

The drivers included with the Abit Siluro T400 are basically standard nVidia reference drivers with an Abit logo added.  We won't bore you with any screen-shots, if you've seen one set of reference drivers, you've seen 'em all! :)  Abit also includes an overclocking utility called "Graphic Max" with the Siluro T400.  The "Graphic Max" utility is similar to many overclocking apps currently available, with sliders to independently adjust the core and memory clock frequencies.

The drivers included with the card installed without a problem, but we were a bit disappointed because they were a fairly old revision of nVidia's reference drivers.  A quick trip to Abit's website looking for a newer revision revealed that the drivers they have available to download are also very old, and are dated September 2000!  Needless to say, we did not benchmark the card with the included drivers, we used nVidia's official 12.41s for our benchmarking. 

Installation & Quality
Plug it in...Turn it on...

INSTALLATION:

Installation of the T400 went without a hitch.  We plugged it into the AGP slot on our clean Windows Millennium test system, booted up, pointed to the drivers when prompted and we were ready to go.  No extraordinary measures were needed to get the Abit Siluro T400 up and running.

IMAGE QUALITY:

The Siluro T400's image quality is on par with all other GeForce 2 MXs.  The only real change made to the MX400 core when compared to "older" GeForce 2 MXs is a slight bump in clockspeed.  Nothing has changed that would alter the quality of the image output.

One thing I've mentioned in all of my GeForce 2 MX reviews, is the Digital Vibrance feature that has been incorporated into all GeForce 2 MXs and GeForce 3s.  The Digital Vibrance settings allow users to alter the color saturation and vibrance to improve overall image quality.  Our man Dave went much more in-depth on this feature when he covered the MX at launch...check out this link for more detailed information. 

THE CARD:

As we usually we do with any new product the enters the H.H. labs, we gave the Abit Siluro T400 a thorough physical inspection before installing it into our test system...

If you we paying attention on page one, you surely noticed that the Siluro T400 does not come with an active cooling solution.   This card is outfitted with a simple aluminum heatsink.  We removed the stock heatsink to uncover what type of TIM (Thermal Interface Material) was used, and found an adhesive pad. We would have preferred to see the stock heatsink mounted with spring clips and thermal paste, but considering the relatively miniscule amount of heat generated my the MX400 chip, a simple heatsink is adequate.  nVidia's original reference design didn't call for any cooling on the MX in the first place.

Our Siluro T400 was equipped with TV-Out, but this card is available without TV-Out as well.   Picture quality on a television is OK for gaming, but don't expect to use a large television in place of a monitor...the resolution is simply too low, resulting in blurred text.  The TV-Out works great for DVD playback though, and because of the GeForce 2 MX400's TwinView technology, you can output a DVD to your television and still work on your monitor simultaneously.

The RAM installed on our Siluro T400 was 8x8MB, 6ns EliteMT clocked at 166MHz, but we had very little trouble jacking things up a bit...


Test System and Some Benchmarks