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Innovision Tornado Geforce 2 MX


Date
: 09/17/00 – 03:20:04 AM

Author
:

Category
: Video Cards

First, lets start off with a history of how I got myself this video card.

It was about a month and a half ago, and I had just gone to a computer show with my Dad to get a bunch of small heatsinks and fans.The fans, because for some reason two of the three spare fans I had died on me, and for some reason I thought the good one was one of the bad ones, and I took it apart, until I realized it was a bad one.Still with me?I got a few fans and some heatsinks, and a few other odds and ends.When I got home, I was going to make a neat little fan sandwich on my Voodoo 3 2000 card.It already had on it a 486 heatsink with a fan on it.I was also testing out the idea of putting RAMsinks on the memory(small heatsinks).So, after I got home, I decided on doing this all at once and getting it done.Since the way I was getting my heatsinks on was by drilling a hole into the bottom and screwing them in from the bottom side of the card, I had to mod one of these new heatsinks.Doing so, alignment was key, and I used a small drillbit to drill a marking through the card and onto the heatsink.This had worked the first time, with the old heatsink, but this time I was less than careful(ugh here it comes), and I drilled through a part of the card.A part of the card that had a bunch of wiring in it nonetheless.

I guess you could probably see where I was going if you read through that whole thing.Since I’m living on the kind of budget a homeless person would laugh at, it took me about 3 weeks to get the money together.

As soon as the Geforce 2 MX chipset was announced, I knew I had to have one.I guess it was a lucky thing that my Voodoo 3 2000 was made into swiss cheese, because my P3 550E @ 733 was starving for more input in Quake3 than my Voodoo3 card could give it.Anyhow, looking for the cheapest solution possible, I was looking through the OEM cards, but nobody local had one.Electronic’s Boutique kept delaying their Hercules Prophet II MX(which was for $149.99).It was a bit more than I wanted to spend, because the MSRP for these things was supposed to be $30 cheaper.After waiting for about 10 days, and numerous other delays, I decided to cave and get something online.Using Pricewatch and it’s seeming partner, Reseller Ratings, I found a suitable online store called OCIE that was selling an Innovision brand MX card for $117.95.This was all OEM, with only the card, a driver CD(which gave you the option of NVIDIA NV11 instead of Geforce 2 MX in the drivers), and the CD of NVIDIA’s cool demos.These days, I think you can get this card for only $111.85, or at least that’s the last price I saw.

First Impressions
.The box came on a Monday morning(ordered Friday), and it was there before I left for work in the morning.Anticipating my joyful return throughout the day, I couldn’t wait to get home and set my eyes on some Quake 3 High Quality.I got home, and unwrapped the package.The box was white, and when I opened it, there sat the smallest video card I’ve ever laid my eyes on.This sucker was small I tells you!Since my computer was already on when I got on, I uninstalled the S3 Virge DX that had been inhabiting it for a month.I installed it without any modifications whatsoever.Once it was all installed, I loaded up Quake3, and put on the highest possible imagery settings.Man, it was beautiful.With Full Scene Anti-Aliasing on at 1024×768, the picture was so sharp and perfect, I felt at peace with the Universe…but that’s another story altogether.I could make the pictures of the driver windows, but who really cares about that stuff.I find it funner to look at this stuff and figure it all out for myself.All in all, a great first impression.What can I say, I was impressed!

Getting games to work
Getting a few of my games to play on this thing was an initial challenge.Add to that fact a single-boot Windows 2000 Pro computer, and you get even more challenge!Being that the only full games I have installed right now are Quake1, Quake2, Quake3, and Civilization 2 Multiplayer Gold, I felt I would focus my attention more on the Quake games.I had to do a bunch of .dll deleting to even get Quake1 to load.Winquake worked pretty well even at first, but GLQuake was a bitch, and remains a bitch still.I just keep getting these banding lines that I can’t seem to get rid of.Sometimes while changing menus, it’ll stop for a minute, but once I go to another menu, it comes back.Even with this, I did a few benchmarks, and at 512×384, I was pulling about 345fps.Yikes is right!Quake2 worked pretty much without a hitch.I couldn’t get out of Software mode for some reason at first, but then deleted a couple .dll files, and everything was dandy.Quake3, of course, worked perfectly, as you might assume.

I decided on copying and pasting the techincal specifications of the card that were on display on the Innovision website.Here they are:

• GPU with NVIDIA Shading Rasterizer and a High Definition Video Processor (HDVP)
• The first Real-time, per-pixel shading processor
• 2nd Generation Transform and Lighting architecture
• Digital Vibrance Control provides crisp, bright visuals
• 350MHz RAMDAC
• 32MB SDRAM on board
• AGP 4X with Fast Write supported
• Drivers optimized for Pentium III SSE and AMD 3Dnow
• DirectX 7.0 and OpenGL ICD supported
• HDVP (High Definition Video Processor) supports all ATSC resolutions, including 720p and 1080i
• My own info – It also has a default core and memory frequency of 175mhz/166mhz respectively.The memory is Samsung -6ns stuff.Probably the most common you’ll see on these cards.

  Modding and cutting stuff up
  After about an hour, I needed something to do with the card, and so decided to add RAMsinks and a much bigger heatsink/fan.These RAMsinks were cut-up from an old Pentium heatsink I had lying around from forever.They were cut with an unelectric jigsaw and sanded down with an electric sander!How about that eh?I took off the heatsink from the chip, and found that the epoxy stuff holding it on was pretty cakey and thick.Since I was already planning on replacing this, I got the stuff off. I got a nice big heatsink(the one that I cut through my Voodoo 3 with..look up for story), and at first, tried to screw the thing in using the tiny little holes that come with the video card, but quickly found that it wouldn’t work.None of the screws I had were small enough for those tiny little pissholes.I kept trying anyway, and then finally gave up.

  I had bought a couple little bottles of super glue a month or two ago, and decided to just use some superglue to get this heatsink on there.I dabbed the corners of the heatsink with the glue and put the thing on.I also did this with the RAMsinks, and screwed a fan into the top of those.What good are heatsinks if you can’t have something to blow away the hot air?Once everything was complete, I put the card in the slot and booted up.No banding lines or lockups or any sort of inbalance in the force, so I decided I had done well.

  Overclocking
  Of course I could never go more than a day without going for the overclock.I downloaded the Coolbits registry file, which should be easily accessible online, and imported the thing.After the required reboot, I went in for the core clock.Since 220mhz was the maximum, I decided to go for 200mhz at first and work my way up by 10′s if they worked.I tested by running a continuous Quake3 loop of both demos in the highest quality mode possible for about 45 minutes.220mhz worked perfectly for this card, and I suspect more would be easily possible as well, since the heatsink is barely warm to the touch.As we’ve seen in most earlier reviews, memory is the thing you NEED to overclock in order to get any worthwhile results.I knew this, and that’s why I decided to put on RAMsinks.This would be my first RAMsink test actually.To see if they were worth the effort.They weren’t, to say the least.After a bunch of tests and whatnot, I could get the memory up to a perfectly stable 200mhz.202mhz would give me visual artifacts after about 20-30 minutes, so I decided that was unstable.I didn’t test 201mhz, because that’s just trivial.200mhz is a nice round number, and is really nothing to be ashamed of.Since I already had a fan on the RAMsinks, I decided to take the sinks off, and just leave the fan going on the bare memory.I did this by supergluing the two fans onto eachother, so that the memory one is sticking out by itself over the memory.Sorry that I have no pictures of this, but it’s a pain to get pictures developed and it costs money I don’t have.If anyone wants to donate a digital camera to me, I would be very happy.Taking off the RAMsinks, 200mhz was still perfectly stable.202mhz still gave me artifacts.I also tried it without the fan, and 200mhz gave me artifacts almost immediately, so I decided that it must be worth it to have some cooling.The RAM got fairly hot without a fan.

  Benchmarks and Overclocking Results
  First, I thought we would compare the Tornado with my late Voodoo 3 2000, and also the Creative Labs TNT2 card I had in a while ago.You can take a look at their results in that article called Creative Labs Blaster TNT2 Overclocking.I’m going to be abandoning the 3 test system that I’ve had with these past cards because the Geforce 2 MX just incinerates them.They really don’t stress the card all that much.I’ve gone with the traditional approach of 16bit and 32bit versions of a bunch of resolutions, like you’ll find with most other hardware sites.First though, lets go with the 3 test results.

  Test 1 is set at the ‘Fastest’ setting, with the texture all the way down. Simpleitems are on, and everything else is off. Test 2 is set at the ‘Normal’ setting, with the Geometric Detail on High and the texture the highest. Simpleitems is off, everything else is on down to vsync, which is off. Test 3 is the same as Test 2, except 1024×768 resolution

  
  There’s really no point in even discussing this.The Tornado handles these settings like they were nothing.At this point, the CPU is probably the bottleneck, because when I’ve tried upping my CPU speed, I get an FPS boost.
  
  
  
  We see the same thing here.The Tornado gets almost twice as much Frames per second than the overclocked Voodoo 3 2000 or TNT2.At this point, the CPU is beginning to come into play.
  
  
  
  
  Now we’re getting somewhere!Overclocked, we’re seeing 15 extra frames per second.Although it’s still over twice as fast as the Voodoo 3 2000 at default speeds, it just likes to stick it to the man and do even better.By the way, this Voodoo 3 using the wickedGL High Resolution settings, will usually get near 50 frames per second.Let us move onto the regular testing.Here are my settings, just so you can copy them to the exact.The sound is set to low quality.
  
  

  System Settings
  GL Driver	Default
  GL Extensions	On
  Resolution	512×384 to 1280×1024
  Color Depth	16/32bit
  Fullscreen	On
  Lighting	Lightmap
  Geometric Detail	High
  Texture Detail	Highest
  Texture Quality	32bit
  Texture Filter	Trilinear
  Graphic Options
  Simple Items	Off
  Marks on Walls	On
  Ejecting Brass	On
  Dynamic Lighting	On
  Identify Target	On

  Ok, now that we have that squared away, lets go through the rest of these bad boys.

  
  
  
  

  I thought I’d just throw out all of the benchmarks and just talk about them all at once.We can see that throughout most of the tests, the mid-resolution benchmarks at 16-bit and 32-bit were most effected by overclocking.There’s really not much I can do here to give you a better understanding of the benchmarks above.By reading any other Geforce 2 MX review, you’ll be able to see that the MEMORY on the video card is the one and only bottleneck.The biggest performance gain when only overclocking the core, is probably under 5fps, and not even that much.With overclocked memory, there are several tests that show a gain of over 15fps.All in all, overclock the memory.The core helps a little, but you don’t really need to stress anything in that area.Focus all of your attention on the memory.

  I’ve also got some Quake2 3.20 benchmarks.As said before, I couldn’t do more than one or two benchmarks in GLQuake.I couldn’t go over 640×480 either, otherwise I would get some sort of internal error.Quake2 works pretty much flawlessly, and so I used that.

  
  Most of the trends of Quake3 are also present in Quake2.The degree of those trends is much larger in Quake2 it seems.It’s almost ridiculous!152.8 to 181.8 fps at 800×600?Come on.I couldn’t seem to get 32bit color to work here…I’m not sure why.When I tried gl_bitdepth 24 or 32, nothing changed.Please tell me if there is another way of changing the bitdepth .Ok, back to looking at these pretty numbers.The highest I could get with my Voodoo 3 was around 145fps.With the Tornado?222.3fps!
  
  

  Conclusions
  Man, what can I say about this card?It has the best performance I’ve ever seen(in my rig anyway).It may not have the power of a 64MB Geforce 2 GTS card, but for 1/3 the price, I’ll take it!In the OEM package I got, there wasn’t any software bundle really, just the card, the drivers, a small manual, and the NVIDIA cool demo CD.There was also no TV-out or TV-in, just the standard VGA monitor connector.This is because this card is made for OEM manufacturers mostly.It’s supposed to be a cheapo card, and so that’s why it has nothing to set it apart from any other Geforce 2 MX aside from it’s low price.

  You can get a much better equiped version of this chipset, by either ASUS, Hercules, or ELSA.The cheapest of those however, is the Hercules, which is $149.95 or thereabouts.At $30 more than I got mine for, it doesn’t offer much more, other than 5.5ns Hyuandi SDRAM.This fact may be a reason to pay $30 extra dollars, because the stuff runs default at 183mhz(instead of my 166mhz), and I hear Hyuandi RAM is pretty overclockable.210-220mhz with that stuff shouldn’t be too much of a stretch.With those extra mhz, you should see some better performance than what I’ve seen as well.Am I dissapointed in my RAM?Not at all.I would rather have some of that 5.5ns RAM, but who wouldn’t want better RAM than what they have?If you get one of these cheaper OEM cards, you’ll almost definitely see Samsung 6ns RAM on them.Without any cooling, 195-200mhz should be a pretty good bet.With cooling, you may get a few more mhz out of the stuff.
  So, if your decision on buying one of these cards is hinging on my review here, lets work out the situation a little.Let’s make a few scenarios.

  I started making a table of all of the different scenarios, but I realized that there are way too many possible configurations to really give you any idea of what you should get.Price/Performance-wise, there is NOTHING out there that will give you the bang for the buck that a cheap Geforce 2 MX card will.If you’ve got a 400-600mhz processor with any card of Voodoo3 generation or older, go for the Geforce 2 MX card and overclock anything(with proper precautions).If you’ve got a <400mhz processor with a Voodoo3 type of card, upgrade the processor first, then the video card second.If you've got a 800mhz+ processor with a Voodoo3, I'll laugh, then tell you to get a Geforce 2 GTS.Basically just use your judgement in the situation.If you have a good processor but a shoddy video card, upgrade the video card.If it's the other way around, upgrade the CPU.

  This turned out to be a pretty danged long review.It took a lot longer to write than any of my previous articles actually.That's probably because I wrote so much more.If you've got any questions or suggestions, just Want to abuse me mentally through email? .Otherwise, just go on the messageboard to tell me what a great guy I am.And tell your friends!I like as much feedback as well.Oh yeah, take the poll on the left!

  Take a peek at the magical spreadsheet!