CARDEXpert TNT2 Ultra 32MB SDRAM AGP
Reviewed by Samuel Hong
Date : 11th January 2000

- The Good - The Benchmarks - The Bad - Test System Configuration - Conclusion - Rating - Other video cards reviews

Thanks to the launch of nVidia's top notch GEForce 256, the TNT2 series of graphics cards have been made so much more affordable, and if you're thinking of purchasing one, now's just about the right time. What better way is there to welcome the new millennium than with a new graphics card! In the competitive arena of graphic cards, each manufacturer has got to make sure its TNT2 card stand out from the rest and not just be another face in the crowd. However, not many manufacturers actually bother to integrate nifty features into their respective offerings, some simply lower their prices, and for the more distinguished brand names, they have already a nice market share and customers loyal to their brands. Basically, when the brand Cardex is mentioned to me, what I have in mind is a no-frills budget card which is reliable as well. I guess my impression of them now is still more or less the same as when I was using their S3 ViRGE based cards, those cards provided adequate performance for non-graphic intensive uses and for the occasional 2D game. Then again, times have changed and the talk now is about how much FPS your graphic card can churn out in a game of Quake 3 or how fascinatingly real and fluid smooth your Half-Life game runs. It's a rarely known fact that Cardex is actually Taiwan's Number 2 video card maker, only trailing behind Leadtek, the current number one. But at the rate Cardex is improving and launching new products, it looks set for the coveted top spot anytime soon. Although the video card arena is very much saturated by the enormous amounts of TNT2 cards available, I'm pretty sure that the Cardex will not just be another face in the crowd.  Let's take a look at their current flagship product, the Cardex TNT2 Ultra!

The package includes the following : These are the contents of the package:		These are the utilities & software that are given on the installation CD:
(1) Cardex TNT2 video card (1) Installation guide (1) Driver+softwares CD		nVidia TNT2 Reference Drivers MS DirectX 6.1 VCD PowerPlayer Expertool Utility

First Impressions

As like all Cardex products, the TNT2 Ultra comes in a small box with bubble packaging featuring a slim manual made from recycled paper and a CD-ROM containing the drivers. No frills whatsoever, just plain and straightforward (almost to the extent of being boring). 

Here's the front and back snapshots of the Cardex TNT2 Ultra, no doubt about it, it looks exactly identical to the original Cardex TNT (Check out Vijay's review on the Cardex TNT). The card looks totally different from the one featured on the website! I guess the one featured on their website is there for vanity purposes only!

Cardex TNT2 Ultra (Front)

Cardex TNT2 Ultra (Back)

Here's a close-up view of the ESMT RAM used on board the Cardex TNT2 Ultra, identical to the ones used on board the Creative GEForce 256. Personally, I've not heard of ESMT RAM and I cannot clarify its 5ns rating as stated on this chip.

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The Good

The Card Inspection

The Cardex TNT2 Ultra has one of the highest quality PCB that I've seen for a graphics card, smooth edges and finely printed circuits show a job well done! Due to the lack of the other various connectors such as TV Out and Digital Flat Panel out, the size of the Cardex TNT2 Ultra is very much smaller than some other TNT2s that I've seen before. 

Passive cooling on for the TNT2 Ultra is indeed unthinkable as the amount of heat produced is probably too great to get rid of by means of just a heatsink alone. Fortunately, the Cardex TNT2 Ultra utilises active cooling. On close examination, the heatsink and fan placed on the Cardex TNT2 Ultra has a fan integrated into the heatsink. Check out some shots of the cooling system of the Cardex TNT2 Ultra!

The Fan	The Heatsink
The Rear of the Fan (Rated 0.04A)	The Front of the Fan (rated 0.05A)

I guess the rating of the fan has some problems, apparently the company who manufactured it rated the fan to be 0.04A and the sticker on the top of the fan (the one end-users see) has been marked 0.05A. Although this is nothing much of an issue since its only a difference of 0.01A, it is indeed puzzling as to which is the correct rating.

Also the heatsink appears to be glued to the TNT2 chip by means of a thermal adhesive, I'm sure most overclockers out there would still prefer to use his/her own favourite brand of thermal compound between the TNT2 and the heatsink. 

The Installation, Driver features and Programs

Installing the Cardex TNT2 Ultra is like any other graphics card, simply slide out your old card and replace it with the Cardex TNT2 Ultra, that's all. It doesn't take an expert to install one anyway. Upon boot up, the system detects the new graphics card and prompts you for the drivers. For me I prefer to take the lazy way out and simply use the installation software on the CD.

After rebooting, you would probably notice the new Expertool logo sitting on your task bar, this provides full control over the Cardex TNT2 whether it's overclocking the core speed or the memory speed or simply adjusting the refresh rate, anyway here's the lowdown!

	The desktop settings tab gives you a set of sliders controlling the resolution, colour, font size as well as refresh rates. One thing's for sure, its definitely idiot-proof and much easier to control, Windows' default does not allow you to control all these in one window!
	The info tab tells you a lot, your chip type, driver version, memory, core clockspeed, memory clockspeed, memory utilisations as well as DirectDraw and Direct3D versions, as its name indicates!
	The monitor settings allow screen adjustment, power saving modes and even discloses the DDC information like when the monitor was manufactured etc. Quite informative!
	The Colour tab offers some test patterns and allows you to change the various colour features with the controls available i.e. Gamma, Brightness, Contrast etc.
	The performance tab is the in-built overclocking software for the video card, the RAM was able to maxed up to 200MHz, but once 3D Mark began, the benchmark would hang and a reboot required. More about overclocking later, the sliders are set at the TNT2 Ultra's default clockspeeds of 150MHz core and 183MHz RAM.

Besides the drivers, the other software included on the CD seems miserly and inadequate for unleashing the brute force and raw speed of the TNT2 Ultra chip. Then again, this is a 'no frills' card and the software included is adequate for most uses! The VCD PowerPlayer included isn't new as I've had it bundled with my old Asustek TNT card. I was disappointed to have only DirectX 6.1 included, since at this time, DirectX 7 has already been released. Perhaps it's time Cardex updated their Drivers CD to include a bit more goodies as well as updated drivers.

3D Quality & Features

OK here's the technical part, we'll have a look at the 3D Features and Quality of the TNT2.

128-bit Wide Frame buffer Interface Supports up to 32 MB SDRAM 300 MHz Palette-DAC Supports up to 2048x1536 @ 60Hz 66 MHz AGP Clock Rate and Full Sideband AGP 4X/2X Mode DVD Sub-Picture Alpha-Blended Compositing Video Acceleration for DirectShow MPEG-1, MPEG-2 and Indeo LCD Resolution up to 1280x1024 and Color Depths up to 16 Million (Optional)
RIVA TNT2 ULTRA TwiN-Texel 32-bit - 2 Texture-mapped, Lit Pixels per Clock - 2 Texture-mapped, Lit Pixels per Clock Single Pass Multi-texture Rendering 24-bit or 16-bit Z-buffer, 8-bit Stencil Buffer High Performance 128-bit 2D/GUI/DirectDraw Acceleration 128-bit Wide Frame buffer Interface Supports up to 32 MB SDRAM 300 MHz Palette-DAC Supports up to 2048x1536 @ 60Hz Variable Length Burst DMA Bus Mastering for Data transfers over 900 MB/s Throughput 66 MHz AGP Clock Rate and Full Sideband AGP 4X/2X Mode TextureBlend Supports Multi-texturing, Bump-mapping, Texture-modulation, Light Maps, Reflection Maps, Detail Textures, Environmental Maps, Procedural Textures - 32-bit ARGB Rendering with Destination Alpha - Point Sampled, Bilinear, Trilinear and 8-tap Anisotropic Filtering Per Pixel Perspective Correct Texture Mapping (Fog, Light, and MIP-Mapping) Wide Cache RAM and 256-bit Data path		128-bit Graphics with over 2.4GB/s Throughput Minimal Software Overhead on Key GDI Calls and DirectDraw Optimized Direct Frame Buffer (DFB) Access with Write-combining Palette-DAC Pipeline Accelerates Full-Motion Video Playback, Sustaining Fast Frame Rates with High Quality Color Resolution True Bilinear Filtering for Scaled Video, and Compensation for Filtering Losses with Edge Enhancement Algorithms Back-end Hardware Video Scaling for Video Playback Multiple Video Windows with Hardware Color Space Conversion and Filtering DVD Sub-Picture Alpha-Blended Compositing Video Acceleration for DirectShow MPEG-1, MPEG-2 and Indeo Supports PanelLink Digital Interface for LCD Monitor LCD Support for VGA,SVGA,XGA,SXGA 18/24 TFT Color Monitors LCD Resolution up to 1280x1024 and Color Depths up to 16 Million VESA EDID Support for LCD Type Auto-detect

The screenshots below were taken using 3DMark 99 Max and compared between the Intel i752 for the image quality, as I've not got screenshots from Voodoo3 or G400 cards. In my ECS P6IWT-A+ review, I compared the Riva TNT against the i752 only to see the i752 having a better image quality, is this the case again? Click on the screenshots to view the full size. Note: All images rendered in 32bit colour except for the i752 images.

Cardex TNT2 Ultra 32MB SDRAM	Intel i752	3DMark99 Reference Shots	Description
			Alpha Blending Between the TNT2 Ultra and the Reference shots, its hard to tell the difference, but the i752 suffers terribly
			Texture Resolution The difference between all the images are very difficult to tell! They are almost similar to the reference image!
			Game-1 Compare the 3D Mark logos and you'll realise that even the almighty TNT2 loses to the i752 in image quality (Now know why I chose to include the i752 shots?)
			Game-2 The TNT2 Ultra does away with coarse details and hides the discrepancies with smooth rendering, look at the footpath and the '99' marking on the gun and compare!

The image quality is still quite bad, but nVidia has supposedly solved these 'teething problems' in the new GEForce 256 chip, then again the image quality is still acceptable, and when the TNT2 Ultra is performing at such fast speeds, who'd bother with such fine details?

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The Benchmarks

All the benchmarks here performed on the latest Windows 98 Second Edition, using the Pentium II 333MHz processor, on a 440BX chipset (BH6). I reckon that the TNT2 cards should be coupled with processors faster than 400MHz to unleash the power, although the TNT2 is happy at 66MHz bus I'm sure it would do great wonders to the performance if the AGP clock was 100MHz!

Here's some benchmark results for you to chew on!

Quake III & Half Life Benchmarks

Half Life / Quake III Timedemo Results (FPS)
	Q3Demo 1	Q3Demo 2	Half Life Timedemo Torture
TNT2 Ultra (150/183)	36.3	35.1	10.245
TNT2 UItra (175/188)	37.6	35.2	10.591
Note: Tests conducted at 800x600 (32bit Colour)

Apparently, the overclocking did boost the performance slightly but its really not much at all! I guess because the speed boost is not much (25MHz boost for core and 5MHz boost for memory). I guess I would have better performance if I had a P!!! processor or something.

Wintune 98 Benchmarks

Wintune 98 Results
	Video 2D (MPixels/s)	Direct3D (MPixels/s)	OpenGL (MPixels/s)
TNT2 Ultra (150/183)	41.56004	128.3647	94.22583
TNT2 UItra (166/185)	43.24878	130.2609	98.57465
TNT2 Ultra (175/192)	43.07176	137.5641	100.9281
Note: Tests conducted at 800x600 (32bit Colour)

3DMark 99 Benchmarks

3DMark99-MAX Results
3DMark Results	Synthetic CPU 3D Speed		Rasterizer Score
Game-1	Game-2		Fill-Rate
Fill-Rate with Multi-texturing	4mb Texture Rendering Speed		8mb Texture Rendering Speed
16mb Texture Rendering Speed	32mb Texture Rendering Speed		Bump-Mapping Emboss, 3-pass
	N/A
Bump-Mapping Emboss, 2-pass		Bump-Mapping Emboss, 1-pass
Notes
The [Max O/C] Setting is 170MHz Core and 188MHz RAM, with the processor at 375MHz (5x 75MHz, AGP/CLK is 1/1).  All results are based on an 800x600 resolution at 32-bit colour depth with each processor's proper optimization.

Super 7 compatibility

I believe this would be a major concern to a lot of users out there. Anyway, Super 7 motherboard users would be delighted to know that there's no problem running this card on their existing boards. As what Vijay said in his other reviews, you just have to make sure that you install the latest chipset drivers, and you should be on your way to having fun with your newly acquired video card. However, users may have a tougher time getting it to run on motherboards using the ALi chipsets. In any case, do make sure you have the latest motherboard BIOS and drivers installed, and there should be little problem.

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