Review: Leadtek WinFast MX DH Pro (Page 1/8)

Posted: December 19, 2000
Written by: Tuan "Solace" Nguyen

Introduction

Over the past couple of months, I’ve taken a look at a ton of graphics accelerators. Some stand out more than others, while the rest are just part of a regular crowd. When something good comes along, things get pretty exciting. But when a product arrives and it’s just like the rest, reviewing it can turn into a chore.

However, sometimes products do come my way that stand out from the vanilla crowd.

For a product to stand out from every other product in its class, it must have features that are not available in another manufacturer’s product of the same kind. It must show a degree of craftsmanship and a dedication to user satisfaction. One such product is in my hands.

Leadtek Research

Leadtek is a company that’s rising in fame every single day. They have products ranging from video devices to motherboards, to of course, video cards. But Leadtek is best known for its video cards. Leadtek produces video cards based on NVIDIA chipsets, which you can find in most stores around the globe.

Recently, many people have been turning to Leadtek for ultra fast NVIDIA based cards that sell for unbeatable prices.

If you haven’t seen Leadtek’s other products, read our reviews on them here:

WinFast GeForce2 GTS
WinFast GeForce2 MX

Today we have Leadtek’s latest product in the lab -- the WinFast GeForce2 MX DH Pro.

MX Architecture

The GeForce2 MX is still based on the GeForce2 core and shares the same features as the GTS model. However, the core speed of the MX GPU has been reduced from 200MHz to 175MHz. But that’s not where the reduction ends. The memory bandwidth has also been reduced. The original GTS cards use DDR (Double Data Rate) SDRAM to help keep data flowing without congestion. With the MX series, NVIDIA has declared that they will use SDR (Single Data Rate) SDRAM rated at 166MHz. This dramatically reduces overall performance of board.

The difference between DDR and SDR is that SDR sends information on only the rising point of each clock cycle and DDR sends data on both the rising and falling peaks. This effectively gives you a double performance improvement in memory bandwidth.

WinFast GeForce2 MX DH Pro

I’ve reviewed quite a few GeForce2 MX based cards in the past few weeks but all of them are based on the same design and don’t offer anything in terms of individuality. To sum things up in terms of manufacturer’s specialty, all was unimpressive. In fact, even though I discussed about TwinView technology in all of them, none of them actually had functioning TwinView capability.

Today, Leadtek changes that with the MX DH Pro. Let’s take a quick look at the card physically.

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