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

Video Cards Used For Comparison (cont):

The other eVga card is their "TwinView Plus", which even though it has the DVI connector, you can't hook up a digital flat panel to it. Instead you use a dongle to allow a second analog vga monitor to be hooked up. This card also has a TV out for even more TwinView flexibility. There is a regular TwinView model which only has analog VGA & TV out, and the TwinView Pro which supports all various configurations including the digital flat panel. My eVga TwinView Plus came with a good sized passive heat sink, bigger than the "Pure" model, and also using clips to hold it in place. The memory was standard 6ns, unlike its Pure cousin (darn). One disappointment was that it came stock at 150 core and 150 memory.

The final card is the Gainward which uses the same compact format and has the same features at the eVga Pure. It too came with a heat sink, however this one had some thermal tape to hold it down, not having any clips on the side. With the GF2MX only putting out 4 watts of heat, this probably isn't that big of a deal. The Gainward came with 6ns memory, however its stock speed was 175 core and 143 memory!!! Ick!

Benchmarks & Overclocking:

Even though memory brand and stock speeds varied among cards, it was interesting to see how well the cards overclocked to. To be fair, each video card was used with a Blue Orb. The test system consisted of my BE6-II v2.0 at a FSB of 141, which would mean AGP speed would be at 94Mhz! I have found these MX's to be exceptionally stable under heavy overclocking, even when at over 100Mhz for the AGP bus!

To compare the speeds, I took benchmarks in 3DMark 2000 and Quake 3 Arena. A fresh copy of Q3A was installed with the latest point release applied, then I went into the setting and choose the High Quality setting; Nothing else was changed. A benchmark of each program was taken at stock speeds, and maximum non-artifacting speeds. A GF2MX can really open up when you start to overclock it, as you will see in the results.

Conclusion:

As you can see the results are quite interesting. Overall the eVga "Pure VGA" was the best performer, having the 5.5ns memory really gave it the extra edge when OCing the card. Both the eVga cards core's OCed real well too, which leads me to believe that either they got a super good batch of components, or they put their cards together just that much better. The only card I don't recommend is the Gainward, even though the core OCed well, the memory just sucked, and with it coming stock at 143Mhz that doesn't really give me much faith in the quality of their product. Also the Gainward's brand of memory was "PLUSS" which I have seen at slower speeds (7.5ns!)...

The GF2MX is an excellent budget card, when it is overclocked you get almost as good as performance as a stock GTS but at almost half the cost. Another advantage the GF2MX has is the TwinView capability. Before your options were to either use a Matrox dual head video card, or add a second PCI video card in your computer (and pray it would work), but now with Nvidia in the arena, you get the performance of a GeForce2, with the coolness of being able to use two monitors. I did experience some difficulties when trying to run Q3A with both monitors active, but that was just about my only problem with a dual configuration. Having the extra desktop space was awesome, but at the same time it seemed overkill for a normal user.

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