NVIDIA GeForce 2 MX - The new mainstream card (3/9)

Overclocking

In principle the MX is nothing but a "castrated" GTS chip. Fortunately this also means that it overclocks very nicely - as long as adequate cooling is provided! The same goes for the memory, which gets noticeable warm even at standard speed. I'm not sure whether this was due to heat from the graphics chip or its own heat dissipation. Either way, I decided to mount a standard 5 cm socket 7 processor cooler onto the chip's heatsink so that it cooled both the chip itself and the memory - a solution that is easily achieved and doesn't void your card's warranty either. The end result was a core speed of 220MHz and a memory clock of 210MHz. That's pretty much the limit, even with more, ahem, elegant cooling solutions. However nowadays it isn't necessarily a higher core speed that gives a card the extra punch, it's the memory that's holding modern chips back.

A little cooling can do wonders with the GeForce2 MX

During my benchmark run the MX was tested at stock speed as well as at the 220/210MHz combination. This is also the maximum setting achievable with NVIDIA's overclocking settings in the reference drivers. Using tools like Powerstrip lets you push the chip higher still, but don't get your hopes up too high - we're talking about 6ns memory here. 220 - 230MHz should be about it.

Copyright: 10.07.2000 -   RIVA Station 2000 - Lars Weinand
No Copy without Permission!

URL of this Article: www.rivastation.com/geforce2mx_e.htm - If you want to link to it, please use this URL! :-)