|
 |
| Installation
and Drivers |
| The
usual thang... |
|
Well
just when I thought that this was going to be the
typical video card installation, I was thrown a
curve ball.
For one, X-Micro has actually included the
latest nVidia Detonator 3 6.31 drivers.
I can’t say how many times we’ve griped
over the fact that older drivers were sent out
with a new card, this is definitely a plus.
One
thing X-Micro hasn’t done is add little applets
and tweaks to the driver package.
Since the test system already had the
Detonator 3 6.31 drivers installed, I didn’t see
any reason to bother with the ones on the CD.
I mean, they’re the same thing right?
Well, as it turns out, there may be a
difference.
I had some difficulties getting FSAA
enabled (which I do not believe to be the fault of
the card).
I had installed and reinstalled the latest
drivers available directly from the nVidia
website in hopes of getting the settings to
function.
After running several FSAA benchmarks with
no success I decided to try the drivers included
on the CD.
I still didn’t get FSAA to work properly,
however I did see a significant increase in the
standard benchmark test results!
I literally saw gains of 300 points in
several 3D Mark tests and gained an average of 10
FPS or more during the MDK and Q3 tests.
Now of course there could be numerous
reasons for this change in performance.
It’s possible that some driver files may
have been overwritten or updated during the latest
driver install or maybe X-Micro does “tweak”
the drivers a bit, but we doubt it.
It’s tough to say.
The moral of this story is never
“assume”.
If you are having difficulties, definitely
take the time and try the software provided with
your new piece of hardware, you may be surprised.
Usually
we take into account any software utilities that
are included with a new piece of hardware.
With this reviewer though, after reviewing
a piece of hardware and it’s accompanying
software, I clean everything off of the system
except for the necessary drivers.
Ultimately I am a firm believer in the
“less is more” mentality.
With that said, I give the X-Micro Impact 4
Ultra a 9 for not cluttering my hard drive
up with excess fluff.
 |
| H.H.
Test System |
| Not
too shabby... |
|
|
Full Tower ATX Case w/ 300W PS, Pentium III
933EB, Tyan S1854 (Via 133A)
Motherboard and X-Micro Impact 4 GeForce
2 Ultra AGP Card w/64MB of DDR SDRAM,
256MB of PC133 True CAS2 SDRAM, Maxtor 15Gig
7200 RPM ATA100 Hard Drive, Pioneer 16max
DVD-ROM, Windows
ME, DirectX 8.0, nVidia reference
drivers (Detonator 3 6.31)
|
 |
| Benchmarks
With The X-Micro Impact 4 Ultra |
| Video... |
|
We ran our usual
battery of benchmarks on the X-Micro Impact 4
Ultra. To test the card's video / DVD
playback performance and quality we ran MadOnion's
Video 2000. The performance of Direct3D was
measure with 3D Mark 2000 v.1.1 also from
MadOnion. OpenGL performance was gauged with
MDK2's built-in timedemo and Quake 3's Demo001.
As usual, V-Sync was disabled for all of the
tests.
First
up was Video 2000.
I think before we got started we knew that
this puppy should be more than adequate for DVD
video playback.
Of course we have provided the numbers to
prove it….
VIDEO
2000
Well,
what did I tell you?
Just like it’s counterparts, the X-Micro
Impact 4 Ultra has no trouble whatsoever with DVD
and video playback. Now let’s take a look
and see how the Impact 4 handles Direct 3D with
3Dmark 2000… 3DMARK
2000
Well
as you can see, the benchmark results are
excellent.
With scores like these, we should have no
trouble pushing the graphics limits. So lets
use a few games that do just that...
Gaming
and Over-clocking Performance |
