Introduction

Herbie!

When NVIDIA released the original GeForce2 MX, we were expecting something along the lines of the TNT2 Vanta -a severely neutered version of their oh so glorious cards. Any serious gamer who has used a Vanta has cried in pain. A weak RAMDAC, a crippled TNT2 core - it's everything a TNT2 shouldn't have been. Naturally, we weren't expecting much out of a video card meant for OEMs, so the thinking sort of carried over when we heard about the MX.

We were stunned when we actually saw the MX in action. Cheap? Performance? Words that rarely belong in the same sentence in the computer world found their way into MX descriptions. Our first experiences with the MX showed it to be quite the performer. The MX was just as good as the GTS at low resolutions, and the card was quite the steal at around $130

GeForce2 MX 400

The RAM

Flashback

Here's a quick recap of the original MX. Last year NVIDIA released the MX based on the GeForce2 core. The main sources of performance degradation came from the halving of the pixel pipelines and the memory architecture. The core only had two pixel pipelines and a somewhat slower speed, resulting in half the fill rate of the GTS. The memory took a beating; 32 MB of 6ns 128-bit SDR chopped the bandwidth in half. Even with these limitations, the MX still managed to put up decent numbers, but, as expected, it did perform poorly at the higher resolutions.

This spring, NVIDIA is releasing a new lineup of MX cards including the MX400. If the 400 is anything like what we got to play with last year, it can't be half bad. In addition to the MX400, NVIDIA is releasing the MX200. The MX200 is similar to the original MX, but with half the memory bandwidth. Today, we are taking a look at the GeForce2 MX 400; so let's get to the business at hand.