Overclocking/TwinView

Manual

To go along with their spiffy-looking box is an equally well thought out instruction manual. Asus didn't think it right to toss in a two-page pamphlet with pictures showing you what a video card looks like. Instead they include a 60-page book with numerous sketches of video cards in various poses.

Aside from the keen visuals, the manual also provides explanations for all those settings most people haven't the faintest idea about. Don't know what type of mip-mapping you want, or what kind of Z-buffering to enable? The manual has little descriptions for it all.

Overclocking

Most GeForce2 MX boards are known to be decent overclockers; the Asus board is no exception. After a few runs to figure out how far we could push this board, we determined that the upper limits of this board were at 190 MHz for the core and 200 MHz for the memory. The key thing here is how far we can push the memory. All of these new video cards are memory bandwidth limited to a great extent. Pushing the memory a good 30 MHz beyond spec gave us almost a 6 FPS increase in speed, not too shabby. I think if we were to slap on some heat sinks and fans, these cards would probably be able to go a bit quicker.

TwinView

As I mentioned before, this is the first GeForce2 MX card we've reviewed with dual monitor support. And let me tell you, I loved every moment of it. I recently joined the ranks of Bob and jumped into the two-monitor scene. Folks, it's only been a scant few weeks and I don't know how I lived with only one monitor. The ability to literally expand your desktop two-fold is extremely useful. For all those times when you wish you could look at a document and a web-page at the same time, or even have a spreadsheet and Photoshop fully maximized at the same time. The uses are limitless and the cost is rather finite when you factor in how much more this feature sets you back.

We tested NVIDIA's implementation and were rather pleased. We were able to run different resolutions and color-depths on both monitors at the same time. Very handy if the second monitor is not as good as the first one. As far as we're concerned, TwinView is a worthy competitor to Matrox and its Dual Head line of cards.

The only problem you might encounter is playing games while keeping the second display on. This problem is not limited to the GeForce card though. Most implementations run into this little snag. Getting by this isn't very hard, you simply disable the secondary display and you are back in business.