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Introduction:
Here's
the NV11. The GeForce2 MX is NVIDIA's product
for the value segment. As these cards get cheaper
and cheaper, they get wider and wider acceptance,
even in those small gaming shops across town that
used to use Voodoo Banshees. Well ladies and gentlemen,
on this corner is Gainward's own try at the value
market with their vanilla MX. There are three
types of MX cards by Gainward, one is this, the
vanilla MX, second is the gold sample and the
third is the hollywood version. Unfortunately,
we only have the vanilla here.
Gainward
GeForce2 MX
For
all intents and purposes, the Gainward MX looks
and feels like the reference MX board. The PCB
cutout is small but not cramped. There's enough
space to replace the standard heatsink (which
was poorly attached with thick thermal tape) with
a bigger one like the Vantec Blue that is used
in FCPGA processors.
The
whole card is within spec, which is to say is
boring. What sets this card from the pack? Well
for one thing, this MX is one of the most AGP
bus stress tolerant cards I've ever tried. It
does BX150 flawlessly even at 128mb aperture size.
I've seen dozens of cards choking at BX133, more
so at BX150. Hats off to Gainward on making this
card extra stable (I wonder how). On to the features...
General
Features
NVIDIA GeForce2 MX
256-bit Graphics Architecture
128-bit SDR Memory Bus
20M Triangles/sec
700M Texels Fill Rate
AGP4X with Fast Writes
32MB of Video RAM
Support for TV-out
175/155 or 175/143 clock speeds depending on bios
Utterly
boring.. told you guys it's vanilla. There's only
one thign that differentiates this MX with others.
I hope you see it. You don't? Well they actually
UNDERCLOCKED the ram. Funny, huh? More on this
later.
Test
System
Intel
Pentium III 500E@750 (5x150)
Abit BE6-2 1.1
2 x 64MB CAS 2 SDRAM
Gainward GeForce2 MX
Aureal Vortex 2 Superquad
Maxtor 13GB 7200 UDMA66 HDD
Windows
98SE
DX7a
Detonator 6.34
Benchmarks
Quake III Arena v1.17, demo001
Fastest 640X480, 800X600, 1024X768
High Quality 640X480, 800X600, 1024X768
3DMark2000 Default Benchmark
Hardware T&L on, 640x480, 800x600, 1024x768,
1152x864, 1280x1024
Overclocking
and Quake III results |
