GeForce2 MX Roundup

Company: VisionTek, eVga, Gainward
Products: GeForce2 MX Video Card
Street Price: ~$120 + S&H
Date Reviewed: January 9, 2001
Reviewed By: Jason

Digital Vibrance Control:

"At home, at work, and on the road, our daily computer usage is increasing, and clean visuals are critical for a satisfying, comfortable viewing experience. Now with Digital Vibrance Control^TM (DVC), the power of stunning visuals is in your hands. DVC is a patent pending innovation for controlling color separation and intensity. With a simple control panel, you select and control the color settings of your display's entire visual output. And the result? Richer colors and brighter, cleaner, more ergonomically pleasing images in all your applications"

In the pictures above, the right sides are enhanced with DVC, contrasting sharply with the untouched left sides.

NVIDIA confirmed that DVC was all software and there’s no special hardware that the control takes advantage of to somehow make your images look brighter. Since it’s all software it makes sense that DVC could be applied to any of NVIDIA's video cards, but this feature seems to be more marketing hype rather than a truly useful feature.

Video Cards Used For Comparison:

VisionTek	eVga "Pure VGA"
eVga "TwinView Plus"	Gainward

There are four different video cards from three different manufacturers I am using for this roundup. Many companies make GF2MX's, but most come in the two reference flavors I like to refer to as "waste a lot of space" like the VisionTek, or "super compact version" like the Gainward. The more compact model may be a more efficient use of space, and it has space for a DVI type connector, only thing it lacks is space for a TV out. The larger size board on the other hand has room for all three.

The first card in the comparison is the VisionTek that was sent from Universal Computer Distributing and sells for $99 on their site. However this is serious "Value Card" in that it doesn't come with a heat sink, and mine came with 7ns memory! I always put aftermarket cooling on my video cards anyways, so this wasn't a big deal to me, however for people that don't wish to take these extra steps have no choice with this video card. I also could not get this card to work in any of my machines, so I contact VisionTek about the matter, and it seems it had something to do with the 7ns memory. So I sent VisionTek my board and they sent me a new one with 6ns memory which worked like a charm. The stock speeds for this card are 175 core & 166 memory, which is right on spec.

The next card up is the eVga GF2MX "Pure VGA", the pure vga being their single vga output card. This card uses the more compact reference design, and it came with a decent size passive heat sink which uses the clip down method so you can put some thermal compound between the heat sink and GPU. To my delight this card had 5.5ns memory, which is what Guillemot uses on their MX's which are clocked stock at 183 memory. eVga states that their cards all have 6ns or better memory, so it was luck of the draw for me. The stock speed for this card was also 175 core & 166 memory.

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