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When people think TNT2 they think explosive high performance. Well, NVIDIA has a new design that's ready to explode onto the low-end scene (with the GeForce 256 going in at the high-end). It's very similar to the TNT2, a chip off the old block so to speak. It's called the TNT2 M64, a TNT2 with a 64bit memory bus instead of a normal 128bit TNT2 memory bus. It's also priced much lower than the normal TNT2. It's called the TNT2 M64 and it powers Guillemot new Maxi Gamer Cougar, the card this article reviews. It is value priced at $119.99 before a $20 rebate and shipping in mid-October. We put The Guillemot Maxi Gamer Cougar through its paces and compared it to a Savage 4 Pro Extreme 32MB and a regular Gigabyte TNT2 32MB clocked at 125MHz for graphics clock and 150MHz for the memory. Read on to see what we found.
The first thing any review of a TNT2 M64 will talk about is the 64bit memory bus. Guess what this paragraph is about. The speed of the memory bus between a video card's processor and its onboard memory plays a large role in determining performance. One aspect of video performance is the memory clock rate. The Cougar's memory is clocked at 150MHz, the same as that of normal TNT2s. Another important aspect of memory speed is the size of the path between the video card's processor and its memory. With normal TNT2s, the path is 128bits wide. With the TNT2 M64 of the Cougar, the path is 64bits wide, half the size. This does not mean that the TNT2 M64 is half the speed of a normal TNT2. Most of the time memory bandwidth is not totally being used up and there are other components, such as the card's processor speed, that effect performance. In real world performance, it means that when you're running at high resolutions (800x600 and above) and/or in 32bit color, the TNT2 M64's memory bus width becomes a bottleneck and it lags behind the normal TNT2. On the positive side, when you're running games in 640x480 without all the quality settings at their highest, the Cougar with its TNT2 M64 is almost as fast and, in some cases, just as fast as a full on TNT2 but for a lot less money.
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