Overclocking
From what I've read on the Kyro II chipset it doesn't overclock very well, but I had to give it a try, so I scoured the internet for a while and downloaded, Powerstrip version 3 beta, this recognises the chipset and allows overclocking, the core and memory both run at 175MHz, and they run synchronously, this means that unlike the GeForce chipset you cannot adjust the core and memory separately. Powerstrip recognises the Kyro II settings at 175MHz, and allowed me to adjust them. I tried 190MHz at first and ran a few games, at 190MHz I got some artifacts on the screen and texture corruption, turning it down to 185 got rid of the artifacts. The Kyro II I have here isn't a very good overclocker, the 5ns Samsung memory is rated for 200MHz. I can only assume the Kyro II core is holding the card back. Obviously overclocking results vary.
I ran some Quake 3 benchmarks to see what sort of difference the 10MHz overclock would make.
| Default Speed | 640*480 | 800*600 | 1024*768 | 1280*1024 | 1600*1200 |
| EHQ Kyro II OC | 130.2 | 117.1 | 88.6 | 55.2 | 37.3 |
| EHQ Kyro II | 128.6 | 113.8 | 84.3 | 52.2 | 35.1 |
Overclocking the Kyro II gave me around about an extra 2 FPS, not much but still an increase. At 185MHz the card seemed to be perfectly stable, and happily ran games for extended periods.
Conclusion
The card has proved to be a mixed bag of performance, in some things it excels but in others it definitely needs improvements, video playback is my main concern with the Kyro II chipset, it seems to suffer badly with highly compressed DivX movies, as seen in the screen shots. As I mentioned in my review the video problems are being worked on regarding playback of DivX films. Video issues aside, its certainly faster than a GeForce 2 MX. The version I had didn't have TV Output which would have been nice, it is available as an option. Right now the Kyro II needs some work, the 2D performance is a bit slow. Hopefully just driver updates will sort the problem but right now I would wait a month or so and see what happens, if they can sort the video and 2D issues out then this could prove to be a very popular card, its much faster in most games than an MX in the Higher resolutions where the MX starts to fade. All I can say is watch this space for driver updates (O:
