nVidia GeForce2 MX Review - Conclusion

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Reviewed: Aug 2000             

 

 

 

 NORMAL: 

This is a bit surprising to see that the MX is still hanging, but this too is not exactly what I call a playable resolution.  Who's gonna drop this much jack into a system to play games at 640x480?  Nope, not me either.

 

HIGH QUALITY:  

Now we're getting into resolutions that we're likely to play at, 800x600.  The GeForce MX starts to show a little bit why it's a "budget" solution here.  While there is no denying that it's the slower of the three cards here, 102 frames per second is still WAY playable.  Normally I would have said "In my opinion", but I challenge anyone to claim that 100FPS+  isn't playable.  Moving on....

 

HIGH QUALITY 1024x768:  

Here the memory bandwidth bottleneck really begins to show.  While 64FPS is still playable, it's a far cry from the 90FPS of the GeForce GTS.

 

HIGH QUALITY 1280x1024:

At 1280x1024 there is no denying that the MX card simply can't hang.  I've heard from several sources that the human eye can only detect 30 frames per second, by those standards this is still frag worthy.  Those standards aside, there ain't no way in hell I'm gonna count on those 38.9FPS being enough when I'm trying to drop the hammer with my rail gun from accross the map.

I have a stellar idea!  Why don't cha hit the next button below so we can see what 1600x1200 has in store for us, and hell, we may as well delve into the overclockability of this bad boy while we're at it.

 

We've seen this thing choke a bit so far at 1280x1024, let's see if we can make it beg us to stop...

 

HIGH QUALITY 1600x1200:

Ouch, I don't know if it's begging us to stop but I am!  22.5?  Not to good.  I gots to tell ya though, DAMN it looked pretty.  In all fairness here, we have it up against two of the baddest cards available here, and they're pretty much brought to their knee's as well. 

 

All of these benches are fine and dandy, can't take a thing away from them, but I would like to add this.  I play more than my share of Quake 3 (a bit more than my share if ya ask my girl) so I have my own "personal settings" I like to use.  When I'm settling down for a night of fraggin' I set all game options on (except simple items and force player models), I set the graphics to normal, and the resolution to 1024x768.  In that configuration for something to do I went ahead and ran a timedemo.  Know what I got?  99.8FPS.  I damn near dirtied my drawers when I fired this card up and played for a bit.  Not only did I not drop any frames, but I couldn't tell a difference between this $130 card and the $300+ GeForce 2 GTS.  I got's to tell ya, bullstuff aside, I was impressed.

 

OVERCLOCKING:

Let me ramble about slightly technical stuff here for just a second.  The ONLY thing keeping this card from performing as well as it's big brothers is memory bandwidth.  With this card coming stock at 175mhz core and 166mhz memory speed, it's a far cry slower than the GeForce 2 GTS's 200mhz core and 333mhz memory.  Now the 333mhz is a bit misleading, it's 333mhz much in the same way that an Athlon runs at 200mhz front side bus. It's actual memory speed is 166 but because it's utilizing DOUBLE data ram, it runs on two pipes at that speed, hence the 333mhz.  With that said, it stands to reason that we should get substantial improvement with every extra mhz we can get from this memory.  

Moving onto the core speed, the default 175mhz is very conservative.  Some models of GeForce MX cards come with no heat sink at all, most come with just a heat sink, no active cooling.  This MX card that we got from nVidia falls into the first group, it had no cooling at all.  That was quickly remedied with a trip to Radio Shack.  $10 later we had the little heat sink fan combo that you saw in the pics on the first page strapped on.  We didn't bother doing any benchmarks with the chipset naked (hehe, I said naked) for the simple reason that no overclocker worth his heat sink grease wouldn't slap a heat sink on this thing.

Alright, the moment you've been waiting for, what were we able to get this card to?  After long hours of highly technical tweaking (Alright, so we installed coolbits and that was it) we were able to get this card stable at 215 core and 205 memory.  We were able to get it to run at coolbits max of 220/210 but we experienced some visual anomalies, so we backed it down to the 215/205 and had absolutely no problems.  

Bear in mind that this card did come with 6ns memory, so with other brands you can expect higher or lower memory speeds depending on the model you purchase.  We did just get a Hercules2 GeForce MX card in that has 7ns memory and it can run at 200mhz, so not too much of a loss, but hey, that's another review.

Enough rambling, lets get right to what kind of performance increases we achieved with this 215/205 overclock.

 

 

What we see here is exactly what we expected.  at the lower resolutions where the memory bandwidth wasn't really being challenged there was nearly no gain with overclocking.  But as we moved up to higher resolutions the extra mhz really paid off.  Overclocking this card brought it from a little slow at some resolutions to very playable performance.  With these cards being built with the .18 micron process, heat is next to not an issue as long as you have some type of cooling mounted on the chipset.  With the older GeForce 256's you could damn near make dinner on 'em when you got carried away with overclocking.  I would feel completely safe running this card at these speeds 24/7 without a worry.

 

I could go on and on about specifications and features of this thing, but the bottom line is that minus the memory you're looking at pretty much the same card as the GeForce2 GTS's.  That and the fact that all the technical BS bores the hell outta me I just ain't gonna do it..  So if you're life is hanging in the balance to find out all the scoop, head over to nVidia's GeForce2 MX page and get technical until you're hearts content.  MX HOME PAGE.  I'll just leave it at there are more features in this card that you can shake a stick at, and they don't leave ya wanting for much.

One last thing before we wrap this one up.  What would an OCA review be without a pic of the review product sitting on a Ratpadz and a pic of it with a beer?  Well, we drank all the beer so that shoots that idea all to hell, but we do have a pic of the MX on a RatPadz:

CONCLUSION: 

Let me start by stating what we didn't talk about and why.  I didn't mention Graphics quality simply because if you've seen a GeForce card at all, you've seen the performance of the MX.  There is no difference between this and the others so I wasn't going to waste you're time loading screen shots that you would not be able to tell a difference in. I will just state that the visual quality is kickass, the color depth and sharpness is damn near amazing.  I would have to say that in non FSAA comparisons, the GeForce beats the Voodoo 5 5500.

I also didn't mention FSAA, again the reason for this is simple.  When FSAA is brought into the picture, the Voodoo 5's have the market cornered, theirs is superior and there's no if's,  ands, or buts about it.  

Here is where I am supposed to give an unbiased opinion of the product.  That's almost hard to do because I was simply amazed with this card for the price.  I would have no trouble recommending this card to even the most avid gamer.  The only way you may be in need of the more expensive GeForce 2 GTS or the Voodoo 5 is if you get a kick outta playing games at extremely high resolutions, or if you're life revolves around benchmarks.  I say that because just about the only difference you will notice if you game with this card instead of a GeForce 2 GTS is benchmark scores.

Is this card as good as the GeForce 2 GTS or the Voodoo 5 5500?  Nope.  Do the GeForce 2 GTS ($300) or the Voodoo 5500 ($300) perform almost $200 better than the MX, I'd have to say nope to that one as well.  If I were to have to make a recommendation to someone with an extra $300 to play with, I would tell them to buy a GeForce MX and spend the other $200 on a CPU.  For $200 you can get a P3 700 that will almost certainly run at 933mhz, and have an outside shot at a gig.  (All three of the P3 700's we've dealt with here in the OCA Secret Lab have been able to hit 1Ghz.)  And if AMD is you're flavor, you can grab a T-Bird for under $200 that will almost definitely hit the big G. 

I know I've probably managed to piss off a bunch of peeps with this conclusion, but I call 'em like I see 'em.  For the value the GeForce 2 MX is the best "bang for your buck" product to come along in a while.

 

PRO'S:

PRICE ($130 to the door)

PERFORMANCE (Games playable up to 1024x768)

DRIVER SUPPORT (nVidia leaks drivers more often than I change underwear.)

CON'S:

COOLING (No cooling at all)

MEMORY (Still using the aging SDR Platform)

 

There ya have it, OCA takes on the nVidia GeForce 2 MX.  Hopefully we'll have a Voodoo 4500 in house soon so we can see what 3dfx has to offer to the same market.  Damn, it only took me one beer more than a six pack to write this too!! I must be getting better! 

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