I can't believe Anandtech hasn't reviewed the new Geforce MX DDR from Creative Labs

[luket]

I just bought a Creative Labs Annihilator2 MX DDR for 130 bucks today. I looked everywhere for some reviews on it and found Nothing.. This card rocks.. Its a Geforce2 MX with DDR ram running around 300MHZ.. Does anyone know about this card yet????

 

[luket]

Hmm, I just read its 64bit, ouch.. For anyone curious about my statisics. I upgraded form an evga MX to a DDR MX and did notice 10FPS increase in Q3 and 500 3dmarks higher in 3dmark 2k..

 

[ahfung]

Sorry to burst your bubble. You have just downgraded actually!!!
Do a simple maths on memory bandwidth:

64 bit 150MHz DDR = 2.4GB/s
128 bit 166MHz SDR = 2.656GB/s

If 64 bit DDR is running at 166MHz(x2) then the bandwidth will be the same as all other SDR MX. However as far as I know Creative DDR MX is only clocked at lousy 143MHz... This is a purely PR trick Creative played to fool ppl who'd delight to see the big attractive "DDR" printing on the box. I've tried very best to tell others this and someone (Leo V comes to mind) talked about this here a couple of weeks ago.

I really can't believe you can still see any increase in Q3A and 3DMark.

If I were you.. I'd immediately return this sucker for a refund!!!

 

[hans007]

it read 64-bit data words. sometimes a data value isn't 128bits, usually a smaller value so , if it only needs small values, the 64bit ddr is better.

 

[ahfung]

"it read 64-bit data words. sometimes a data value isn't 128bits, usually a smaller value so , if it only needs small values, the 64bit ddr is better."

WTH you are talking about?

With this philosophy a 32 bit memory bus should be the best for G400, and 16 bit would matchless perfectly with V3. Oh yes forgot that, then Rambus RDRAM would have best efficiency with a all-ISA 16 bit system. :Q

 

[hans007]

if you read on the 128 bit bus, it has to take in 128bits of data at a time, with the ddr the bus is 64bits, so it can read in smaller words. Even if you want to take in say 47bits, you'd have to take in 128bits on the 128bit sdr cards at a time, therefore wasting like all those other 81bits. On the 64bit ddr, you'd be wasting less, since you can get it in smaller packets. Kinda like hard disk cluster size waste i guess. So even if the creative doesnt quite have the same bandwith its a little more efficient assuming latency was about the same which it is.

 

[WetSprocket]

I thought the original MX was 64 bit also. Was is 128 bit? Whats the Geforce 128 or 256? I'm so confused wheres the P rating on these things.

 

[JayPatel]

i wouldnt really say hes downgraded, ive been able to mess around with about a dozen MX DDR's and all of them have memory modules that are extremely overclockable, DDR ram overclocks much better than sdram modules in my experience. and i beleive i did read one review where the mx ddr ran circles around an sdr mx when it was overclocked.

 

[RoboTECH]

64-bit DDr will be slighly slower than 128-bit SDR running @ the same speed due to the latency of DDr being slightly higher than SDR

 

[WetSprocket]

Ok I've got it. The MX supports 64bit SDR/DDR or 128 bit SDR. I think they would be about the same. Just like the Matrox G400(128bitSDR) and the G450(64bitDDR) Its just cheaper to produce the 64 bit version because of the traces to memory.

 

[percboy]

Yeah..Yeah.. but where can we get a heatsink to mount on these things???????????

 

[percboy]

Anyone..Anyone.. Bueller?

 

[ahfung]

hans, this is obviously not correct.

In computer world only the lowest hardware logic/gate level deals with bits. To OS and software/application/games, they organize bits into bytes for easier management. The minimum unit they will transfer is in byte. The situation you described will never happen in the real world unless upon hardware failure. Simple as this:

128 bit bus width: can handle 16 bytes/words at the same time
64 bit: only 8 bytes/words at the same time.

Giving the highly sequential nature of video graphic processing, having wider bus width gives extremely favorable bandwidth increase.

 

[hans007]

ahfung, well thanks for correcting me. I was thinking really low level, i took an ASM class last year, and like i thought it was like when you read a keyboard buffer. You read like usually a byte at a time for an ascii character, but on some things you have to read the entire buffer into a certain space etc even if its not full.

 

[ahfung]

The fact is, most 6ns SDR SDRAM easily go above 200MHz. A lot of SDR MX users are reporting this. However very few GF/GF2 GTS can overclock to 200MHz with 6ns Infineon DDR SDRAM. 180 - 190MHz are much more realistic for current batch of DDR.

 

[tops2]

forgot where i saw it, but there was a review comparing the creative mx vs hercules mx. after you overclock both, hercules beats the creative in 16bit, but creative beats hercules in 32 bit

 

[Mingon]

I have just received a geforce ddr for a second PC i'm building, tested it in my current system and got a 3dmark 2000 default score of 5150 at 210core 360 memory. Not to bad really compared to my gts score of 7400