NVidia Geforce 2 MX/400 Review
Written: Mar 31 '02
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Performance, TV-Out, Drivers
Cons: No extras, performance problems on some high end applications
The Bottom Line: This card is marketed toward people who are looking at value alone. It does not include any extras, but does feature relatively good performance and a TV-Out.
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| mpkr69's Full Review: VisionTek GeForce 2 MX |
I bought this card in Oct. 2001 after my Savage 4 could no longer meet my needs. At the time, the card cost $100 which was within my tight budget.
This card featured a Geforce 2 MX/400 GPU, AGP Bus, 64 MB SDRAM, and a TV-Out S-Video jack. Included with the card was a manual and drivers CD (no extras like games, adapters, or cables).
The installation of the drivers was relatively easy in Windows 2000. Windows automatically installed the card for me without ever using the drivers CD. I did take a look at the driver CD and noticed that it contained drivers for various operating systems. I also discovered that this card uses NVidia drivers and not Visiontek Drivers. Visiontek does not even write a driver for this card. This comes to an advantage since NVidia constantly updates their drivers and finding updates to the drivers will not be a problem for years to come.
My Celeron 400 (256 MB RAM) had games such as Unreal Tournament, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Need for Speed: Porsche Unleashed (in Win98), and Max Payne. I was amazed at how the video card had made such an improvement in performance. The Savage 4 could barely even handle these games, but the Geforce 2 MX/400 had no problems.
Using this card on the newest games at high resolutions gave this card some problems. I found out that Return to Castle Woflenstein would lag when run at high resolutions. 800x600x32 seemed to be a good resolution for most games.
The TV-Out feature was nice since it allowed me to play games and watch movies on my TV. One drawback, though, was that I had to buy some extra equipment from Radio Shack. I had to buy a $20 adapter to convert the S-Video interface to an RCA. Many TV's, and VCR's do not have an S-Video input but do have RCA inputs. My VCR only had RCA inputs so I had to buy an adapter, an RCA cable, AND an S-Video cable. This means that you may need to pay up to an extra $40 just to get your TV-Out to work. It would have been nice if Visiontek would have at least included an adapter. But after all, this is an inexpensive, value-based card.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 100
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Epinions.com ID:
mpkr69
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Member: Matthew Parker
Location: College Station, TX
Reviews written: 6
Trusted by: 1 member
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