No video card review would be complete without a sampling of Quake III benchmarks.  We tested the Abit Siluro T400 using Quake III's built-in timedemo, Demo001, at a variety of resolutions and color depths...

Quake 3 Arena (16 and 32-Bit) Standard OpenGL Benchmark...

QUAKE III ARENA:

At Quake III's "Fastest" setting, the Siluro T400 performs admirably, breaking 100FPS up to 1024x768.  The "Fastest" setting is pretty ugly though, let's up the ante and take a look at some numbers using the maximum "High Quality" setting.

As you can see, on average the performance of the Siluro T400 is about 20% lower at the "High Quality" setting.  However, considering the price of this card, playable framerates at 1024x768x32 may not turn off many users.

We also overclocked the Abit Siluro T400 to try and make up some of the ground we lost in the "High Quality" tests.  With the card in it's completely stock configuration, we were able to overclock our T400 all the way up to 220MHz. Core and 210MHz. memory without any ill effects.  Considering this card is not equipped with active cooling, we think this is a very respectable overclock.  Let's see how it affected the performance though...

With the Abit Siluro T400 overclocked, we saw performance gains at all resolutions.  With some basic cooling modifications, tweakers will most likely be able to squeeze even more performance out of the T400.

At the time this article was written, the Abit Siluro T400 with TV-Out was available for less than $80.  The overall performance of the GeForce 2 MX400 may not get power users excited, but budget gamers should be more than content.  Technically there are no real drawbacks to owning the Abit Siluro T400, but there is one factor that should be taken into consideration...the Kyro II.  On similarly configured systems, the Kyro II consistently outperforms the GeForce 2 MX400 and costs only slightly more.  If you're in the market for a budget card and know you want an nVidia powered product, we can recommend the Abit Siluro T400 with a clear conscience.  However, if you're open to something new, the Kyro IIs are probably the better choice for most.  Based on it's excellent price, good overclocking potential, quality construction and decent performance, we give the Abit Siluro T400 a HotHardware Heat Meter rating of...

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