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| Hardware
Monitoring With The Winfast
GeForce 2 MX |
| Good
Stuff... |
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The
Leadtek GeForce 2 MX DH Pro is the first card I
have tested that shipped with hardware monitoring
built-in. 
Aside
from the thermal probe mentioned on the previous
page, there is another feature that separates this
card from other MXs...a set of three LEDs (Light
Emitting Diodes) indicating whether or not the
card is operating at AGP 4X, if it has power and
if there are any errors. Hey! BigWop!
Why didn't you mention this "physical"
feature on the other page!?! Well, I'll tell
ya! If you didn't know ahead of time that
these LEDs were there, you would never notice
them! 
The
small bank of components right in the center of
this pic are the LEDs. They are very tough
to see as they are very small and not
labeled. However, when the DH Pro is plugged
into a slot the LEDs are very bright and
noticeable. There
is also some cool software included with the DH
Pro called WinFox... 
When
hardware monitoring is enabled, the WinFox
software keeps tabs on a few of the underlying
aspects of the card like temperature, fan speed,
voltage...etc. 
The
sliders at the lower left can be used to change
the sample time for the above graph or to change
the critical temperature. The sliders for
fan speed and Voltage level don't appear to do
anything in this version of the software
though. Should this change with any future
revisions of the software we'll let you know. Something
we found that's worth mentioning is that the
WinFox software functioned normally with nVidia's
reference drivers installed. This is good
news, as most savvy users will opt to install the
much newer reference drivers. There
is also a handy overclocking utility included
which Leadtek calls Speed Runner... 
As
you can see here, our card wasn't very
uncomfortable when over-clocked. The default
clockspeed of the DH Pro is 175MHz. for the core
and 166MHz. for the memory. We were able to get
our card's core over-clocked to 201Mhz (a 15%
increase) and the memory up to 204MHz. (a 23%
increase). Let's see what effect increases
like these make on the benchmarks!
Overclocking
and Gaming Performance |
