According to most reviews etc, this card comes with a large passive heatsink. However, the model I received came with a small, cheap looking fan which worried me greatly as I want this for a MCE PC. When I plugged it into my PC and turned it on I was pleasantly surprised. I tested it in a near silent HP box, and it is completely inaudible so the fan must be very quiet (I would guess <25db).
I was expecting the card to have a standard VGA output and an S-video out, with a composite converter. It actually had a composite port built into the card in addition to the above, which is a nice feature. Unfortunately, the quality of the composite output is quite poor and the NVIDIA flicker filter (which blurs things) needs to be turned up.
Performance is pretty good for a budget card on my ageing P4 2.0 Wilamette with PC133 ram. I got a 3DMark2001SE score of 4200-5200 compared to a score of 7200 when using a Radeon 9700Pro on the same machine. Interestingly, the score for both cards does not vary with resolution, which suggests the PC itself is the bottleneck (probably the memory). I tested it on FS2004 and with the settings at medium-high (capped at 50fps) it ran brilliantly, averaging above 30fps. It even runs adequately with AA turned on.
For MCE use it seems to fit my needs perfectly. It is very quiet, and on my machine live TV requires approx 25% CPU utilization compared to 30% for the Radeon 9700Pro. I am not sure why the utilisation is lower with the FX, unless it has something to do with the hardware mpeg decoding.
As noted above the composite output is pretty poor and lots of flickering can be seen without the flicker filter. I found the colour balance incredibly hard to setup, but perhaps I was just being fussy. Fortunately, the S-video output is completely the opposite. Images are very sharp with no flicker, and much better colour balance (I needed to make no adjustments).
In summary, this is a great MCE card, and easily fulfils my requirements for playing FS2004 on reasonably high settings with an ageing PC.
