With the GeForce2 MX line of cards already conquering the mid-level videocard market, here is yet another addition to a rather overpopulated sector - the MSI MX400 Pro-VT32S. MSI has taken the reference design for nVidia's GeForce 2 MX400 GPU and added a few goodies of their own to spice up the mix. In particular, MSI has added S-Video VIVO (Video In, Video Out) and 5 ns SDRAM. Last but not least, who could forget the pretty red PCB too!
It seems that MSI has taken a liking to red PCB's, red is also the colour of a few of their newest motherboards as well. However, the best feature on the MX400 is the Live VGA BIOS protection. It's basically dual bios support on a videocard, somewhat similar to that of several motherboards from Gigabyte (most notably).
The real question as I sat down and opened up the pink box the MX400 ships in, is whether or not this card would be able to impress me as much as MSI's superfantabulous GeForce 3 (StarForce 822).
Another thing that was rather nice to see was
the presence of active cooling on top of the nVidia MX 400 GPU -
heck, there was even thermal paste between the core and heatsink!
As I mentioned before, it
was nice to see 5ns SDRAM used rather then the usual 6ns, hopefully
this would translate into better overclocking results. Also note that the MX400 memory is clocked
higher then the standard MX400 cards are. Default clock speeds for the MX400
Pro-VT32S is 200/183. This is up from the regular 200/166 ratio.
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