Duron 850MHz and 2 MX on an Abit KT7A was the first computer I built for myself. I used it for a very long time, upgraded CPU to Athlon XP 1600+ and GPU to Sapphire Radeon 9600 Pro. Fun fact: only Sapphire cards would still work in AGP 1.0 slots at that time, other manufacturers cut corners and provided only voltages for AGP slots 2 and 3.
I had a 1Ghz Duron with 2MX and a piece of crap ECS/PChips Mobo. Then I upgraded to 256MB RAM and later to FX5200 which was the worst purchase of my life. I also remember GTA 3 which was fucking pain to play on the Duron + 2MX combo, but most of my friends couldn't even run it :)
Oh man, the GeForce 2 MX! I remember getting this card back in mid-2000 as a replacement for my (back then) trusty Voodoo2... it was a fantastic upgrade at the time, and it's responsible for giving me the best gaming years of my life as a teen! Excellent review!
Pretty sure I kept my SLI setup with my GeForce 2 MX for at least a bit. Mainly for Glide games, but it was also fun to switch between them and contrast image quality and performance. Even at this point there were D3D and Open-GL games still hugely optimized for 3DFX that meant an SLI setup could be competitive with GeForce 2 MX in some situations.
I had a Geforce 2 MX running with a Duron 700. It was the first system i was building completely by my own. Upgrading from a P2 333. Getting all the parts together and learning all that PC stuff by doing, it was amazing back then. This machine was a blast and a real gaming PC on a budget. I can remember Giants: Citizen Kabuto and Sacrifice were absolutly stunning with this card. Huge landscapes and that sweet bumpmapping on Kabuto.
GeForce 2 MX, one of my favorites cards ever, along with the Savage4, Voodoo 5 and GeForce 750 Ti. I wish I'd invent a time travel machine and went back to the GeForce 2 era, it would be like: "Hey guys, this is our budget and bottom stream card of our time, the nVidia GeForce 750 Ti"...100% of game programmers would kill themselves in desperation of not knowing how to digest it or trying to understand if CUDA is a food. hahaha.
My mom bought me my first PC back in summer 2002 in Yakutsk, the coldest major city on Earth. It was: Athlon XP 1600+/256MB DDR/GeForce 2 MX400 64MB DDR/40GB HDD/DVD-ROM. It was the one the coolest PC here. I installed a pirate copy of GTA3 and amazed with the real 3D graphics and gameplay, as I had PS1 with GTA and GTA2.
My 2MX story is simple: upgraded from a K6-3 400MHZ system to a Duron 750 and the Diamond 16 MB Voodoo Banshee card from the K6-3 was pretty ancient. Was my first NVidia card, and it soldiered on in my main PC through a few more CPU upgrades. Great little card.
Yeah, I had a GeForce 2 GTS back in the day, I splashed out and got a Hercules 3D Prophet 2 GTS 64MB. It was pretty awesome at the time! I remember lugging that machine, with my 17" Sony Trinitron around to my mates places for LAN parties. We'd stay up all weekend, and play until we practically fell asleep in our chairs! So much fun!
The Up Late Geek , I also purchased a Prophet 2 back then on an Athlon 1.1 ghz & 32 bit color really was a new thing at the time & most games ran like sh*t in 32 bit, I wonder what color mode he is testing these games with?, I must admit though when I set up this videocard & started up Unreal Tournament 2003, it was funny to hear the announcers voice exclaim "Holy Shit" on the auto setting, 64 megs on this videocard was overkill, lol, there was definitely some fun to be had with this videocard, just Giants Citizen Kabutu hated it, 32 bit color = low fps period during those good Ol' Win98 days & was only good for pics back then.
I had one Geforce 2 MX (not 200, not 400), with 32MB SDRAM, on a 128bit memory bus. It had nice performance for the money, and it was on par with the original Geforce. It replaced a TNT2 Ultra, and it was much faster in games that required T&L, while being low power. The system I put it in was an Athlon 800 MHz, with 512MB of SDRAM and a 4x AGP slot.
I remember when we got the Geforce 2 MX Card and we put our few savings together to afford it. before that we had a crappy Ati rage 4mb card that wasnt good at all. So it was a huge step forward on the graphics and it was realy great :-)
These were in allot of my friends machines, very popular and played along fine with the titles of the time fine. I do remember my gf3 ti200 absolutely wiping the floor with them though and the nerdy gloating that came with it at LANs. Fun times.
The GeForce DDR was my first Nvidia card and it was absolutely amazing for its time. I was kinda pissed that 6 months after I got it the GeForce 2 launched.
I remember playing GTA III on this GPU as a kid. It was my first video card I ever owned, and it was a gift from a family member. After a year or so I picked up a Geforce 4 Ti 4200 and was on my way...
I had the msi geforce 2 mx 400 64mb ddr. It was the card I used in the first computer I built, with a 1,13ghz t-bird. It was great, I could play all games at high settings, and it was faster then all but one of my friends computers, that had 1,4ghz and geforce 2 ultra.
counter strike, max payne no one lives forever (nolf2 was struggling I think), supreme snowboarding, quake 3 arena, unreal tournament, nfs porche 2000, revolt, half-life deathmatch, 1nsane, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2, airfix dogfighter, project igi, Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon, colin mc rae rally 2. I can't remember how well my pc did in all of those games, or if I actually used the gf2 mx on all games, but I used my old 15" monitor from ibm aptiva. I think I played in 1024*768 max. I don't think I got another graphics card before gf4 mx. I used the msi k7t 266 pro-r with fist 128mb ddr ram, then 384. I tend to say more then I need to when talking about this :P
I had a GeForce 2 MX400 back in the day: it was my upgrade from the Voodoo 3 2000, and I was quite happy with it for quite some time. I later replaced it with a GeForce 3.
People always bash this card and show only Doom 3 and Morrowind. etc. Thanks for being objective and showing what it was really meant for + the games it runs well. The power consumption is always an overlooked benefit
Thanks for the nice video, brings a lot of good memories back. This was my first GPU I bought with my own money, and it still works. Also, would be really nice to see a Geforce3 review.
Well, it was quite a nice option when GF4 series hit the market, with neat features such as shaders (hello Sands of Time), EMBM and really good performance for a quite reasonable price. And I'm talking about GF3/Ti200, because Ti500 was ridiculously pricey and rare.
When my Voodo 3 2000 died it was replaced under warranty by this card. edit:I tried running GTA 3 with the 500Mhz celeron and it was a slideshow for the most part of the game
I had the GeForce MX 200 or 400 (can't remember exactly) and a Duron 1Ghz in 2001! Had that card for 4-5 years. I am still blown away that it played a lot of games surprisingly well compared to the non MX counterparts like GTS, Pro, Ti and Ultra. I have played tons of games on it and I really loved it.
In the late 90s, I had a PII-450 with a TNT1 while my friends had slightly cheaper but much worse performing K6-2 380 machines with Voodoo Banshee cards. By 2000 or so the machine was starting to show its age, and I couldn't play Black & White because it required hardware T&L. My cousin bought me a Geforce 2 MX for my birthday, which (along with a PIII-550 CPU upgrade a couple years later) added a couple more years to the machine's life. Both video cards were great for their times.
I used to have Creative Geforce 2 mx 32 mb ddr 64 bit memory. It was actually slower then sdr version. It had no cooling on gpu neither on memory. I installed an old cpu cooler on it and overclocked it. I also remember i had a problem with my older agp 2x slot in my pc. The pc didnt want to post standard way, it was a nightmare, i changed the way to start up with setting the psu power button as a main power button in bios.
I have wonderful memories of this card, I was running a intel pentium 3 coppermine 933 mhz processor and 512 mb ram had a 64 mb geforce 2 mx 880.0 rev a 64 mb model. It was my first AGP card if I recall in 2000 and I played Halflife, GTA 3, SIN, Quake and Quake II, Starcraft, Red Alert, Total AnnihilationN GTA III, Warcraft III, Diablo, Max Payne, Farcry some of my best memories were from this card.
Only Phil would call that setup "very modern" I love it and I still own one of these along with an MX 4 and a Quadro 2. Very good cards for what they were. Especially when paired with a system that uses Rdram. Very oddly the Nvidia cards performed better on that platform as I recall.
And for some reason it doesn't run GTA III very well... I remember playing GTA III and Vice City pretty well with this same card, not sure what Phil's settings are here.
Back in the day (well, actually in 2003/2004) I had an FX5200 and also could run Half-life 2 with decent frame rate, but not GTA III. What is even funnier, GTA San Andreas ran better than III, even though I was being "held back" by the 1.8GHz P4.
i got this gpu for my first computer and quickglued an cpu fan to this bad boy and it overclocked like 20-30% more on the core and my addiction to OC was born. :)
My first GPU was a 64MB PCI GeForce 2 MX400, which I had originally put in a Compaq Presario tower with a 400 MHz Celeron and 64MB of RAM as an upgrade from its onboard SiS graphics, it had no AGP slot, so I was stuck with PCI. I got it used like I did with everything back then, and had originally wanted a TNT2 since that was recommended for one of the games I wanted to run, but the one my dad brought home didn't work so when we went to exchange it all they had was a GeForce 2 MX 400 which was even better, double the VRAM of the TNT2 and was quite a lot faster anyway. That card went into my next two systems, a 733 MHz Coppermine P3 system and a 1GHz Tualatin Celeron system, the 733 P3 board had AGP but I had no better GPU at the time so I kept the PCI GeForce 2 MX, but the Tualatin board didn't have AGP since it was a lower end board so I'm glad I kept the GeForce 2 MX since it worked well with that too, though was feeling a bit anemic by then. Eventually got myself a GeForce 4 MX 440 when I upgraded to an Athlon XP 2600+ system that replaced the 1GHz Tualatin, then I got an MX 4000 which just doubled the VRAM to 128MB but otherwise was the same as the MX 440, and then a real upgrade to a Radeon 9600 XT as my last AGP card, though I had gone to a P4 system when the cheap ECS board fried my Athlon. Eventually I went to a PCIe system with a GeForce 6600 GT which lasted me quite a while before it also died. By the time it died though I had moved onto more modern things like a Radeon HD 7850.
I bought one in 2001 for a really, I mean really low price. It was an MSI low profile version with 32MB sdr and vga port only. It allowed me to play Black and White. Good old days...sniff.
Ths takes me back. My first PC had a GeForce 2 MX 400 in it, wich essentialy just had 200Mhz Core Clock from the factory and a slightly higher Fillrate. I had actualy beaten GTA 3 on that thing with very similar Performance as shown in the Video and Doom 3 was the game that finaly made me upgrade myy entire PC, wich was a Hyper Threaded Prescott P4 with a GeForce FX 5600 256MB, probably the most cutting edge System I ever owned.
The most cutting edge PC of the time would've had, at least, a single-core Socket 939 Athlon 64 CPU and, at least, a Radeon X300 GPU. Neither of these parts were affordable to me at the time. That's why I remember them.
There was a time in 2010-11 where i only had a pretty old system (AMD Thunderbird 1200, 1GB DDR) with a Geforce 2 GTS which VRAM died after a few months. Found an Elsa Geforce 2 MX somewhere and replaced the broken card with it and even carried the TV-out daughter board from the GTS to it. I remember being suprised that it wasnt such a big downgrade as i thought, at least for the things i did with it it was totally alright. I mainly played 2D games and emulators at this time and RUclips was just getting started with HD content. But i also remember trying an early version of Minecraft on it, dont recall if Alpha or Beta, and it ran better than it (honestly) should have. This poor GPU sure worked hard for its retirement, still have it boxed away somewhere. Getting back to a useful PC after that was quite a blessing.
@PhilsComputerLab I remember playing GTA3 on my XP1800+ (Stock) with a GF2MX and I had to use 3D Analyse in order to apply a specific modification for T&L. Otherwise it was too laggy. I don't know if you used it here because i'm really surprised of the results. (Although I don't know the details and resolution used here, and can't remember what I used back then ... probably 800x600 or 1024 max ...)
I would say a Radeon 9800XT, which was a beast of a graphics card, quite faster at higher resolutions, high level of detail and filtering than the 9700 pro.
Just so you understand my choices: -GeForce4 MX 440 is an even more popular OEM card which can play games up to 2005, including GTA SA and NFS MW 2005. It's legendary. You could also put a GeForce FX5200 64-bit 128MB, which is THE most popular OEM card, but it's shittier than MX 440 128bit 64MB -Radeon 9700 Pro was a milestone in PC gaming in 2002. Later models were just improvements of it. It made NVIDIA cry and release the FX series. -8800 GTX was the first Unified Shader card, and made ATI cry in 2006. The 7xxx series were just a beefed up 6xxx series, but ATI's X850/X1xxx series were close in performance to those. the 8xxx series made ATI/AMD what it is today.
Hi! I really enjoy your videos! Could you compare some athlons xp with pentiums 4 ? I was wondering wich one is faster. I also see large capability of overclocking those amd processors!
My parents bought a Dell Dimension 4400 in 2002 that came with this card (it was a base model configuration, don't recall if it was the faster 400 version). To think that OEMs were still shipping machines with this card 2 years after release shows that it was a decent product that aged well.
These were absolute gold for teenagers on a budget back then. I remember my friends much cheaper Duron/GF2MX machine being very competitive with the Athlon/GF2GTS that I had to work my ass off to afford. I know NVidia doesn't have to really care about growing market share any more but it does seem they have totally forgotten about the low-end in the modern era. These cards were basically a refinement of the previous generation's high end and offered at a budget price, you don't get that any more.
I used to have one and honestly I can't recall a single good thing about it. It didn't work well with P2B-S i had at that time, switching to Duron on some MSI or Soltek mobo didn't change all that much as well. And not that it was some cheap crap, it was a Creative for pete's sake. They replaced it for me with a Leadtek card based on GF4 MX440 and things went much better, I've managed to get some decent OC on it as well but the prejudice towards nVidia remained and stays strong in me even today. I sold it and bought a Radeon 8500 Pro - now that was something else!
I remember at that time my main video card for gaming was 3dfx Voodoo5 5500, I purchased one GeForce 2 MX card simply because it was so popular, almost every video card manufacturer was selling this card of their own brands, and I wanted to know how's the performance. After some uses I was kind of disappointed, I knew that it was a cheap card, should not compare it with Voodoo5 in gaming performance, but what really disappointed me was that the video output quality, it was inferior to that of Voodoo5, in both 2D and 3D image output, so I removed this card, and put my beloved Voodoo5 back in my PC.
Ah , memories, your video Phils brought me back to 2001 when I had GF 256. Before I buy it my school-mate's father who was an IT geek advised us to spend a lil bit more for GF2 MX, but we didn't listen and we went for GF 256, it was a bit cheaper. We were quite happy with it. They were pretty much identitcal in performance. +- 2-3 fps in games is practically nothing.
Another great video. I am amazed how well it runs HL2! Back in the day the MX cards were looked down on as many games didn't run them! Many game specs shown on the sides of game cases would say 'runs on most video cards but not the MX range'. They were really looked on as trash. However this would be for games that came out a few years later. Don't ask me why but I am sure those of us who were around at the time will be surprised that anybody would rate this card.But it runs HL2 like silk! Seems like you have debunked another myth!
Its possible, and its a long time ago but I remember it as being the MX cards. But that doesn't matter as you have shown it to be pretty damn fine, and it overclocks well too. That's why your channel is so good, you just give the figures and that is what matters in the end.So good job. I will dig out some old games and check it out, but that was the general attitude back in the day.
Well you are are right. I found Driv3r which says - GF 440 MX and Intel Extreme not supported and Splinter Cell Pandora Tomorrow GF 4MX and GF 4 Go not supported. We all just thought it was any MX Geforce that was low rent, so again, I have learnt something new. The weird thing is that the whole GeForce 3 range works with these games but the later GF 4 MX, a generation later didn't. But that's off topic.
I still have my GeForce 2 MX PCI with original box, the card had so low power consumption Creative didn't even bother to put on a heatsink, but I did put one on mine. I had it in an AST Pentium 200MMX, the 2 MX replaced a 3dfx VooDoo and Matrox Mystic combo
I got a "Manli" GeForce 2 MX400 on January 2002 (I'm from Spain), upgrading from Riva TNT, on a Pentium II 350Mhz. I was just blown away seeing the company still exists (manli.com) and makes graphics cards, they must be only selling in Asia now. A Legendary card for sure! EDIT: I still have my benchmarks results from 2004 (Pentium 4 2.8Ghz) with this card on 3DMark 2001 SE => 3DMark Score 2957. Pretty close to your result!
Had a Duron 650 oc-ed to 800MHz. The later GF2MX400 was a match made in heaven. Initially ran it with a V3-3000 but that became quite limiting with only 16bit colour and 16MB. vram.
My dad in 2001 owned a blasting/explosive compound producing company, that post 9/11 had to close down due to insurance premiums(from ~250k USD a month to millions a month), with some government BS spread in for good measure. I was 7 years old at the time, and during the bankruptcy phase of things, my dad liquidated some of the computers they used right into my lap. With some hand holding from my dad, i took apart the 5(6?) desktops he brought home. cannabilzed them into one system with the GPU being this card(mine had a blue pcb though, imo looks awesome). And i remember it barely running BF1942 and later replacing it so i could play World of Warcraft when it launched a few years later. The amount of games i played on that system still hits me with nostalgia when i remember/find said older games(ie from myabandonware) and run them on my current computer(5800x3D cpu/x570 mobo/3070 ti). Which funny enough has caused my significant other much confusion as ill switch from playing modern titles to... old games like train town deluxe/battlezone and other weird stuff, at least to normies. Fast forward to today(two months ago 10/22; 12/22 as of writing this) my grandma passed away, and she had a storage container that we had to clean out... low and behold, that computer, in its original glory was wrapped up in a million trash bags, waiting for me to cut it open. To find out the gpu it still outputs a VGA/S-video(dvi would not work despite the socket having good contact on the board, idk why it wouldnt work tbh) in my windows 98' nostaliga system but soft locks the system anytime 3d is involved. The rest of the hardware was not usable, the athlon cpu was a paperweight, the mobo had burst caps and broken soder joints(in colorado, think the way the temps can change drastically here caused that over time), and the rest of the system was ewaste. Really wish most of the hardware, esp the gpu still worked, as having the same hardware in a working computer today would make me tear up a bit. Luckily, i repurposed all that stuff into a nice wall mounted disessembled computer. which in doing so made me curious to have the modern view of what the performance of the card was, and lead me to your channel. Subbed.
Another great video Phil. To answer your question about the impact the Geforce 2 MX made to my life. Absofukinglutely none. I was still using my pimped out Amiga 1200 for a few years after its release. It wasn't till i eventually got a Pentium 3 machine back in around 2003/4 ish? that i got a used Geforce 2 mx card and damn it sure was great even though it was a fairly old by then. BTW i still have my Amiga 1200 and get on the internet with it. Its something i will most likely take to the grave with me as i could never part with it.
It would be cool if you did a vid about later AGP (like the 7600GT) cards and their performance with Pentium 4 (478) CPUs as I think that would educate people on how far the P4 can go!
I preordered the 3dfx Voodoo3 3000 and the VisionTek GeForce 3 and was active at PC LAN parties back then. Perhaps it was just because it was seen as a value card, but I can't recall anyone who actually liked the GeForce2 MX. I was under the impression that it sold so well because CPUs and motherboard chipsets didn't have integrated video back then and PC builders had to throw SOMETHING in to make the system functional. I was glad that so many were using that instead of ATi Rage II or S3 Trident graphics like so many others, but I still thought it was worse than it really was. It wasn't until I comfortably played Unreal II with the integrated GPU on a new nForce 2 board that I realized the MX series was better than people gave it credit for. My twin brother even made an Anandtech thread about it and people just scoffed. We had always been on the bleeding edge, even buying a 6800 Ultra at-launch (and a 6600GT to play around with), so we just never paid it attention before that. I do recall being disgusted when a coworker spent $300 on a 6600GT at Circuit City only to find that it had been resealed with a GeForce 2 MX 200 inside. Someone even transferred the sticker on the card that is visible through the window! He bought it to play Final Fantasy XI and, understandably, that wasn't going to cut it.
first gpu i bought was a 32mb geforce2mx it was paired with a pentiumIII 866mhz on a qdi legend socket 370 motherboard, tbh everything ran great! eRacer was my first racing game on the pc. the gpu was made by sparkle. in the day they were the best brand. QDI LEGEND were the mb kings back in the day the machine was very expensive about £350 in 2000
This was my first ever 3d graphics card. Up until that point I'd been stuck without one. It really was quite something as an introduction to 3d acceleration on PC. Though of course I had an n64 since 1996, and that was putting software rendered 3d graphics to shame for quite a while. That experience tempered how dramatic a change it was for me overall, but still compared to the PC games I'd been playing before then it was like night and day. Ironically perhaps it's the only Nvidia graphics hardware I owned. In fact even if you include my rather large collection of games consoles, the only other thing I have ever owned with NVIDIA graphics in it the Nintendo Switch. Nintendo's hardware was of course designed by ArtX, at a minimum up until the Wii... (they also designed the n64 hardware it seems, even if they were still a part of SGI) But the PS2 on my desk has some kind of graphics chip, but of course, the Nintendo Switch is only the 3rd ever console using NVIDIA tech, so that's not a huge surprise I guess. Still, I have fond memories of my Geforce 2 MX. Playing the original sims, bridge commander, and a bunch of other things I don't remember quite so well... XD
Hello Phil, great video!.One thing someone could say is that the chip came out with 64bit and 128 bit memory bus so, 64 bit memory versions are the ones that should be avoided.
I actually jumped from a 32mb Gigabyte TNT2 Pro straight to a 64mb Leadtek Geforce 4 ti4200, so skipped a few generations. I remember it was that now mostly forgotten 3d Command and Conquer game that made me realise the tnt2 couldn't cut it anymore. You could get away with an older video card if You were still using low resolutions for games.
I know I am late to the game here but my Grandma pulled out her old Athlon XP 1700+ computer and gave it to me and it sports one of the smallest Geforce2 MX 200 cards I have ever seen. Only 32MB of RAM but it works quite well. I have Geforce 4 MX 440 card and not sure if the upgrade is worth it.
The GeForce 2 MX wasn't amazing, but it was affordable and got the job done which was by-far the most important thing back in the days of crippling software rendered performance and the dreaded S3 Virge (a nice basic video card for DOS but if you try its 3D acceleration on any Windows-based games you're gonna have a bad time, there's a reason they call it the "graphics *de*celerator"). Basically the GTX 1060 of its day. By the way Phil, what drivers would you recommend most for a 2 MX 200 running on Windows 98SE?
Go with older drivers instead of latest. Pick one that is 6-12 months after the game you want to play. Usually it will give best performance and compatibility with that game.
I had a geforce 2 mx200. That was very slow card. Actually no perfomance boost from riva tnt2 vanta, that I had before upgrade. After that I've got a geforce 2 mx400 from my friend. He's father liked games and he got annoyed by mx400 perfomance. He got a geforce 4 ti 4600. And that mx400 is that I am using nowdays. It has a strange bug. When the video output in text mode (bios screen, dos prompt, even in windows dos box), the text symbols displaying with noticable delay, like they loading from slow 140 bod modem
Currently rebuilding my first new bought computer, a 1.4 AMD thunderbird and a geforce 2 (allthough I do not remeber if it had the 2 MX or the 2 MX 400, doesn't matter much though, I've got them both here. Even the keyboard I had with it is still present, a logitech wireless optical mouse with wireless keyboard, only problem atm is that I do not have enough AA batteries.
PhilsComputerLab Thanks for reply! I am keen on to see a video about 8800 GTX! I bought it for my 2007 dreambuild and it is awesome Id like to see your review about this card. BTW do you still own those 7800 GTX?
Phil I know you dont use older drivers for this card but when i had similar 200mx the oldest drivers was the fastest eg drivers before 12_41 those Wx95_ something . 12_41 came with the first support for directx 8 . maybe its a OS-issue :
i actually flashed one of these cards which was a mac card that i got in a quicksilver g4 mac, flashed it to from MAC to PC, and i really have to say that after using this video card for windows 98se i was really impressed with its performance on windows. i was running it on a pIII 700mhz and it seemed that this video card helped to make the system feel alot more responsive + current and usable. Benchmarks always place the geforce 2 low on the chart but for whatever reason i really have had good experiences using this graphics chip! and the 2D performance + dual monitor support was supposed to have been game changing at the time! did they ever make a Geforce 2 Ti?
I bet if you went to or checked out online a used PC parts dealer you could find a bunch of OEM Geforce 2 MX cards cheap. It was a super popular and good performer for the time, but Nivida made so much better GPU's soon after.
I agree, Dell and I think Gateway used it in their higher end machines. Some Geforce 2 MX cards had a composite video jack and some card manufacturers combined it with a TV tuner. It might have been the GPU that really put Nvidia on the map.
Reminds me of my old PC using the very same card (gf2 mx/mx400) and tries to play Doom 3 back in the day at the lowest setting possible, and it's still unplayable (getting 20 fps at best). Overclocking it to 225 MHz and fixed a 9 cm fan in front of it.
Much of the performance of MX series cards depends on the drivers, and it is not that the latest is the best. This seems to be one of the first cases of product obsolescence by newer drivers. On the optimal everything goes more smoothly than you can see on the test.
This was my first AGP card, I had it with a Pentium 2 400, 96MB of PC100 SDRAM, and a SB Live! 5.1... Sure it was a budget rig for 2001, but it was all I could afford in grade 8 and it smoked my Pentium MMX 233, Voodoo2 8MB, 32MB EDORAM, and a no name SB Compatible card. I miss those days.
Buddy Can you help please ? i have a Dell Optiplex 755 which i use for my recording studio and i am looking to set up dual monitor's i need a graphics card that is cheap + silent . It does not need to be graphics intensive Thanks ;)
I guess I got lucky and didn't even realize it until now. I wanted a pc for retro gaming, so I just bought a Win 98 machine (complete and working) online, and it has this card. I only bought the pc an hour ago, so obvi it hasn't arrived yet, but it seems like it will be a decent card for vintage gaming. I was afraid it was going to be some entry-level card that came with a business computer lol
Remember the 2-4 fps thing in Doom3. It happened to me in 2002 on Geforce 4 MX440, when first Alpha Demo was released. Could not believe, some card will run it good, because I had just new card. Got frustrated. Later, I've found of course Nvidia trick, Geforce 4 mx440 was basicaly rebadged Geforce 2. Was upset like hell, that I didnt buy Geforce 4 4200 ti instead, which was only 33% more expensive. We had screwed 2 years 2002-2004 with MX440 instead 4200 ti gaming years, I found it years later. But in mid 2000, to buy Geforce 2 and use it till mid 2002, had to be awesome experience, I believe. I was on voodoo 2 on that time as many users, but we didnt upgrade. I remember, how in 2000,2001 and 2002, games was just too much for voodoo2, and I've started to feel the age even on lower resoltions and 16-bit. I've played Giants citizen kabuto 16-bit, 640x480 because of it. With Geforce 2, we could play it 1024x768 32-bit, for sure. It was good card for mid 2000-mid 2002 era. I would say best buy, for little money. All people, that invested in june 2000-dec 2000 into this card, and ran it for 2 years, could considered themself happy. Instead, people that paid 300$ for geforce256 SDR or DDR in dec 1999, didnt make good choice. as half year later, this 150$ card had same performance and consumed less power, and didnt have problem with some motherboards. Not sure if to waste 150$ was worth for 6-8 months of playing during nov 1999-jun 2000. Geforce2 MX after overclocking, could catch Geforce256 DDR, that costed $300 in nov 1999, and consumed 4W instead of 16W, so 4x less power.
I think the MX 400 PCI is what i had, with a Athlon XP 1500+. I remember GTA 3 running a bit crap on it, but a bit surprised considering PS2 ran the game at least 2x faster. Wonder why that is? My card after this was the ATI 9500 (non pro) and then again in 2004 for Half Life 2 with the GF 6800 Ultra.
![DF Retro: The Story of Nvidia GeForce 256 - The Original 'GPU' [Sponsored]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/7JEAoKlFvrc/mqdefault.jpg)
The 2 MX and a Duron 600-800mhz is a match made in heaven , this combo was extremely popular back in the day.
Good idea :D
Duron 850MHz and 2 MX on an Abit KT7A was the first computer I built for myself. I used it for a very long time, upgraded CPU to Athlon XP 1600+ and GPU to Sapphire Radeon 9600 Pro. Fun fact: only Sapphire cards would still work in AGP 1.0 slots at that time, other manufacturers cut corners and provided only voltages for AGP slots 2 and 3.
Had one. But with Duron 700MHz overclocked to 900. And ofc GeForce 2MX. I remember playing at that time on it Operation Flashpoint and Mafia.....
That's true. Remeber my own AMD Duron + Geforce 2 setup back in the days..
I had a 1Ghz Duron with 2MX and a piece of crap ECS/PChips Mobo. Then I upgraded to 256MB RAM and later to FX5200 which was the worst purchase of my life. I also remember GTA 3 which was fucking pain to play on the Duron + 2MX combo, but most of my friends couldn't even run it :)
Oh man, the GeForce 2 MX! I remember getting this card back in mid-2000 as a replacement for my (back then) trusty Voodoo2... it was a fantastic upgrade at the time, and it's responsible for giving me the best gaming years of my life as a teen!
Excellent review!
Thanks!
Nothing can beat a Voodoo 2 SLI! Jokes aside, the 2MX is much better. Its fun tho to see Doom 3 running on a Voodoo 2 SLI.
@@cptcrogge I remember the MX400 being a common and "decent" card. It was no voodoo though. Voodoo was beyond top of the range in it's time
Pretty sure I kept my SLI setup with my GeForce 2 MX for at least a bit. Mainly for Glide games, but it was also fun to switch between them and contrast image quality and performance. Even at this point there were D3D and Open-GL games still hugely optimized for 3DFX that meant an SLI setup could be competitive with GeForce 2 MX in some situations.
I had a Geforce 2 MX running with a Duron 700. It was the first system i was building completely by my own. Upgrading from a P2 333. Getting all the parts together and learning all that PC stuff by doing, it was amazing back then. This machine was a blast and a real gaming PC on a budget.
I can remember Giants: Citizen Kabuto and Sacrifice were absolutly stunning with this card. Huge landscapes and that sweet bumpmapping on Kabuto.
GeForce 2 MX, one of my favorites cards ever, along with the Savage4, Voodoo 5 and GeForce 750 Ti. I wish I'd invent a time travel machine and went back to the GeForce 2 era, it would be like: "Hey guys, this is our budget and bottom stream card of our time, the nVidia GeForce 750 Ti"...100% of game programmers would kill themselves in desperation of not knowing how to digest it or trying to understand if CUDA is a food. hahaha.
My mom bought me my first PC back in summer 2002 in Yakutsk, the coldest major city on Earth. It was: Athlon XP 1600+/256MB DDR/GeForce 2 MX400 64MB DDR/40GB HDD/DVD-ROM. It was the one the coolest PC here. I installed a pirate copy of GTA3 and amazed with the real 3D graphics and gameplay, as I had PS1 with GTA and GTA2.
My 2MX story is simple: upgraded from a K6-3 400MHZ system to a Duron 750 and the Diamond 16 MB Voodoo Banshee card from the K6-3 was pretty ancient. Was my first NVidia card, and it soldiered on in my main PC through a few more CPU upgrades. Great little card.
Yeah, I had a GeForce 2 GTS back in the day, I splashed out and got a Hercules 3D Prophet 2 GTS 64MB. It was pretty awesome at the time! I remember lugging that machine, with my 17" Sony Trinitron around to my mates places for LAN parties. We'd stay up all weekend, and play until we practically fell asleep in our chairs! So much fun!
64 MB? Nice, that was super premium back in the day.
The Up Late Geek , I also purchased a Prophet 2 back then on an Athlon 1.1 ghz & 32 bit color really was a new thing at the time & most games ran like sh*t in 32 bit, I wonder what color mode he is testing these games with?, I must admit though when I set up this videocard & started up Unreal Tournament 2003, it was funny to hear the announcers voice exclaim "Holy Shit" on the auto setting, 64 megs on this videocard was overkill, lol, there was definitely some fun to be had with this videocard, just Giants Citizen Kabutu hated it, 32 bit color = low fps period during those good Ol' Win98 days & was only good for pics back then.
I had one Geforce 2 MX (not 200, not 400), with 32MB SDRAM, on a 128bit memory bus. It had nice performance for the money, and it was on par with the original Geforce. It replaced a TNT2 Ultra, and it was much faster in games that required T&L, while being low power. The system I put it in was an Athlon 800 MHz, with 512MB of SDRAM and a 4x AGP slot.
Same!
I remember when we got the Geforce 2 MX Card and we put our few savings together to afford it. before that we had a crappy Ati rage 4mb card that wasnt good at all. So it was a huge step forward on the graphics and it was realy great :-)
This card had pretty good longevity. Had one myself. I remember keeping things at 800x600 which was good back then.
These were in allot of my friends machines, very popular and played along fine with the titles of the time fine.
I do remember my gf3 ti200 absolutely wiping the floor with them though and the nerdy gloating that came with it at LANs.
Fun times.
The GeForce DDR was my first Nvidia card and it was absolutely amazing for its time. I was kinda pissed that 6 months after I got it the GeForce 2 launched.
I remember playing GTA III on this GPU as a kid. It was my first video card I ever owned, and it was a gift from a family member. After a year or so I picked up a Geforce 4 Ti 4200 and was on my way...
Bro, this videos about old stuff are waking up so much emotions and nostalgia in myself, N1.
Glad you like them!
I had the msi geforce 2 mx 400 64mb ddr. It was the card I used in the first computer I built, with a 1,13ghz t-bird. It was great, I could play all games at high settings, and it was faster then all but one of my friends computers, that had 1,4ghz and geforce 2 ultra.
What sort of games did you play?
counter strike, max payne no one lives forever (nolf2 was struggling I think), supreme snowboarding, quake 3 arena, unreal tournament, nfs porche 2000, revolt, half-life deathmatch, 1nsane, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2, airfix dogfighter, project igi, Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon, colin mc rae rally 2. I can't remember how well my pc did in all of those games, or if I actually used the gf2 mx on all games, but I used my old 15" monitor from ibm aptiva. I think I played in 1024*768 max. I don't think I got another graphics card before gf4 mx. I used the msi k7t 266 pro-r with fist 128mb ddr ram, then 384. I tend to say more then I need to when talking about this :P
I had a GeForce 2 MX400 back in the day: it was my upgrade from the Voodoo 3 2000, and I was quite happy with it for quite some time. I later replaced it with a GeForce 3.
i had a ti4200, a bit newer, and it lasted me til 2008! what a beast. getting 90 fps in css at 1600x1200 was killer.
+Jay F In DX7 mode or DX8.1 mode?
I had a Geforce 2ti and a friend had a 4200ti. It was a monster indeed, at it's time.
I had the MX400 version of the GeForce 2, quite a nice little card there.
People always bash this card and show only Doom 3 and Morrowind. etc. Thanks for being objective and showing what it was really meant for + the games it runs well. The power consumption is always an overlooked benefit
I have four GF2MX400 and they still working :)
I have a bunch too actually with various brands and specs :)
I had the exact same ELSA Gladiac MX model from your review, It was such a HUGE improvement over the my older savage 4 card.
As long as you selected 16-bit colour these cards managed decent frames in most games in the day.
Cool video! I used the geforce 2 GTS and it was a great card for its day. I built many PC's for friends with the MX.
You should try Tomb Raider Anniversary with these cards. The game was released in 2007, but it has DX7 support.
Cool! I've got this game on Steam :)
This card and Quake III Arena are one of my fondest memories of the early 00's and gaming in general. Loved everything about it!
Thanks for the nice video, brings a lot of good memories back. This was my first GPU I bought with my own money, and it still works.
Also, would be really nice to see a Geforce3 review.
What do you like about the GeForce3? It will for sure get reviewed, but I don't know when.
Well, it was quite a nice option when GF4 series hit the market, with neat features such as shaders (hello Sands of Time), EMBM and really good performance for a quite reasonable price. And I'm talking about GF3/Ti200, because Ti500 was ridiculously pricey and rare.
I loved that card. I had so many of them lol. They also overclocked a bit if you rigged a fan onto the heatsink as well!
I think my first Windows XP machine had these MX cards but it had 64mb of vram and S-Video out. Good memories!
When my Voodo 3 2000 died it was replaced under warranty by this card.
edit:I tried running GTA 3 with the 500Mhz celeron and it was a slideshow for the most part of the game
I had one of these, but the DDR version.
It was such a great card back in the day.
I had the GeForce MX 200 or 400 (can't remember exactly) and a Duron 1Ghz in 2001! Had that card for 4-5 years. I am still blown away that it played a lot of games surprisingly well compared to the non MX counterparts like GTS, Pro, Ti and Ultra. I have played tons of games on it and I really loved it.
I had Voodoo 3 2000 with 16mb on that time period.
In the late 90s, I had a PII-450 with a TNT1 while my friends had slightly cheaper but much worse performing K6-2 380 machines with Voodoo Banshee cards.
By 2000 or so the machine was starting to show its age, and I couldn't play Black & White because it required hardware T&L. My cousin bought me a Geforce 2 MX for my birthday, which (along with a PIII-550 CPU upgrade a couple years later) added a couple more years to the machine's life.
Both video cards were great for their times.
I used to have Creative Geforce 2 mx 32 mb ddr 64 bit memory. It was actually slower then sdr version. It had no cooling on gpu neither on memory. I installed an old cpu cooler on it and overclocked it. I also remember i had a problem with my older agp 2x slot in my pc. The pc didnt want to post standard way, it was a nightmare, i changed the way to start up with setting the psu power button as a main power button in bios.
I have wonderful memories of this card, I was running a intel pentium 3 coppermine 933 mhz processor and 512 mb ram had a 64 mb geforce 2 mx 880.0 rev a 64 mb model. It was my first AGP card if I recall in 2000 and I played Halflife, GTA 3, SIN, Quake and Quake II, Starcraft, Red Alert, Total AnnihilationN GTA III, Warcraft III, Diablo, Max Payne, Farcry some of my best memories were from this card.
Only Phil would call that setup "very modern" I love it and I still own one of these along with an MX 4 and a Quadro 2. Very good cards for what they were. Especially when paired with a system that uses Rdram. Very oddly the Nvidia cards performed better on that platform as I recall.
Damn this card runs HL2 well. o.0
And for some reason it doesn't run GTA III very well... I remember playing GTA III and Vice City pretty well with this same card, not sure what Phil's settings are here.
Back in the day (well, actually in 2003/2004) I had an FX5200 and also could run Half-life 2 with decent frame rate, but not GTA III. What is even funnier, GTA San Andreas ran better than III, even though I was being "held back" by the 1.8GHz P4.
+timpedra I bought SA during the Steam summer sale, I'll install it and try it out for future reviews.
I had run HL2 on a Riva TNT2 Ultra. Lowest settings, 640*480, one frame per 3 seconds, but it worked!
Can't wait to see GTA SA on the reviews
i got this gpu for my first computer and quickglued an cpu fan to this bad boy and it overclocked like 20-30% more on the core and my addiction to OC was born. :)
My first GPU was a 64MB PCI GeForce 2 MX400, which I had originally put in a Compaq Presario tower with a 400 MHz Celeron and 64MB of RAM as an upgrade from its onboard SiS graphics, it had no AGP slot, so I was stuck with PCI. I got it used like I did with everything back then, and had originally wanted a TNT2 since that was recommended for one of the games I wanted to run, but the one my dad brought home didn't work so when we went to exchange it all they had was a GeForce 2 MX 400 which was even better, double the VRAM of the TNT2 and was quite a lot faster anyway.
That card went into my next two systems, a 733 MHz Coppermine P3 system and a 1GHz Tualatin Celeron system, the 733 P3 board had AGP but I had no better GPU at the time so I kept the PCI GeForce 2 MX, but the Tualatin board didn't have AGP since it was a lower end board so I'm glad I kept the GeForce 2 MX since it worked well with that too, though was feeling a bit anemic by then.
Eventually got myself a GeForce 4 MX 440 when I upgraded to an Athlon XP 2600+ system that replaced the 1GHz Tualatin, then I got an MX 4000 which just doubled the VRAM to 128MB but otherwise was the same as the MX 440, and then a real upgrade to a Radeon 9600 XT as my last AGP card, though I had gone to a P4 system when the cheap ECS board fried my Athlon. Eventually I went to a PCIe system with a GeForce 6600 GT which lasted me quite a while before it also died. By the time it died though I had moved onto more modern things like a Radeon HD 7850.
I bought one in 2001 for a really, I mean really low price. It was an MSI low profile version with 32MB sdr and vga port only. It allowed me to play Black and White. Good old days...sniff.
I had one of those, awesome card. I remember it was GTA 3 that finally made me upgrade to something faster though.
Ths takes me back. My first PC had a GeForce 2 MX 400 in it, wich essentialy just had 200Mhz Core Clock from the factory and a slightly higher Fillrate. I had actualy beaten GTA 3 on that thing with very similar Performance as shown in the Video and Doom 3 was the game that finaly made me upgrade myy entire PC, wich was a Hyper Threaded Prescott P4 with a GeForce FX 5600 256MB, probably the most cutting edge System I ever owned.
The most cutting edge PC of the time would've had, at least, a single-core Socket 939 Athlon 64 CPU and, at least, a Radeon X300 GPU. Neither of these parts were affordable to me at the time. That's why I remember them.
Nice , history and tests. What is the name of the song around 3"50 min.We appreciate this.
There was a time in 2010-11 where i only had a pretty old system (AMD Thunderbird 1200, 1GB DDR) with a Geforce 2 GTS which VRAM died after a few months. Found an Elsa Geforce 2 MX somewhere and replaced the broken card with it and even carried the TV-out daughter board from the GTS to it. I remember being suprised that it wasnt such a big downgrade as i thought, at least for the things i did with it it was totally alright. I mainly played 2D games and emulators at this time and RUclips was just getting started with HD content. But i also remember trying an early version of Minecraft on it, dont recall if Alpha or Beta, and it ran better than it (honestly) should have. This poor GPU sure worked hard for its retirement, still have it boxed away somewhere. Getting back to a useful PC after that was quite a blessing.
@PhilsComputerLab
I remember playing GTA3 on my XP1800+ (Stock) with a GF2MX and I had to use 3D Analyse in order to apply a specific modification for T&L. Otherwise it was too laggy. I don't know if you used it here because i'm really surprised of the results. (Although I don't know the details and resolution used here, and can't remember what I used back then ... probably 800x600 or 1024 max ...)
Nice I had a Geforce 2 mx pci version it was a replacement for my first ever 3d card 3dfx voodoo Banshee.
Next videos should be about:
- GeForce4 MX 440
- Radeon 9700 Pro
- 8800 GTX
MrMateczko AGREED %1000
what about the 7800gtx?
How about like the GeForce FX 5200, GeForce 7300 GT, Radeon X1550, GeForce 6600 GT.
I would say a Radeon 9800XT, which was a beast of a graphics card, quite faster at higher resolutions, high level of detail and filtering than the 9700 pro.
Just so you understand my choices:
-GeForce4 MX 440 is an even more popular OEM card which can play games up to 2005, including GTA SA and NFS MW 2005. It's legendary. You could also put a GeForce FX5200 64-bit 128MB, which is THE most popular OEM card, but it's shittier than MX 440 128bit 64MB
-Radeon 9700 Pro was a milestone in PC gaming in 2002. Later models were just improvements of it. It made NVIDIA cry and release the FX series.
-8800 GTX was the first Unified Shader card, and made ATI cry in 2006. The 7xxx series were just a beefed up 6xxx series, but ATI's X850/X1xxx series were close in performance to those. the 8xxx series made ATI/AMD what it is today.
Hi! I really enjoy your videos! Could you compare some athlons xp with pentiums 4 ? I was wondering wich one is faster. I also see large capability of overclocking those amd processors!
Uhm he already did.....
My parents bought a Dell Dimension 4400 in 2002 that came with this card (it was a base model configuration, don't recall if it was the faster 400 version). To think that OEMs were still shipping machines with this card 2 years after release shows that it was a decent product that aged well.
These were absolute gold for teenagers on a budget back then. I remember my friends much cheaper Duron/GF2MX machine being very competitive with the Athlon/GF2GTS that I had to work my ass off to afford.
I know NVidia doesn't have to really care about growing market share any more but it does seem they have totally forgotten about the low-end in the modern era. These cards were basically a refinement of the previous generation's high end and offered at a budget price, you don't get that any more.
I used to have one and honestly I can't recall a single good thing about it. It didn't work well with P2B-S i had at that time, switching to Duron on some MSI or Soltek mobo didn't change all that much as well. And not that it was some cheap crap, it was a Creative for pete's sake. They replaced it for me with a Leadtek card based on GF4 MX440 and things went much better, I've managed to get some decent OC on it as well but the prejudice towards nVidia remained and stays strong in me even today. I sold it and bought a Radeon 8500 Pro - now that was something else!
I remember at that time my main video card for gaming was 3dfx Voodoo5 5500, I purchased one GeForce 2 MX card simply because it was so popular, almost every video card manufacturer was selling this card of their own brands, and I wanted to know how's the performance. After some uses I was kind of disappointed, I knew that it was a cheap card, should not compare it with Voodoo5 in gaming performance, but what really disappointed me was that the video output quality, it was inferior to that of Voodoo5, in both 2D and 3D image output, so I removed this card, and put my beloved Voodoo5 back in my PC.
Yes I think with Nvidia the image quality varied between cards. 3dfx, with the V3 and later had the IQ nailed down.
Ah , memories, your video Phils brought me back to 2001 when I had GF 256. Before I buy it my school-mate's father who was an IT geek advised us to spend a lil bit more for GF2 MX, but we didn't listen and we went for GF 256, it was a bit cheaper. We were quite happy with it. They were pretty much identitcal in performance. +- 2-3 fps in games is practically nothing.
I had a Hercules 3D Prophet II MX back in the day, loved that card. I think I bought it just to play SHOGO at a decent speed.
Another great video. I am amazed how well it runs HL2!
Back in the day the MX cards were looked down on as many games didn't run them! Many game specs shown on the sides of game cases would say 'runs on most video cards but not the MX range'.
They were really looked on as trash. However this would be for games that came out a few years later. Don't ask me why but I am sure those of us who were around at the time will be surprised that anybody would rate this card.But it runs HL2 like silk! Seems like you have debunked another myth!
Sure you don't mistake it for GeForce4 MX? Because those are an entirely different story.
Its possible, and its a long time ago but I remember it as being the MX cards. But that doesn't matter as you have shown it to be pretty damn fine, and it overclocks well too.
That's why your channel is so good, you just give the figures and that is what matters in the end.So good job.
I will dig out some old games and check it out, but that was the general attitude back in the day.
Well you are are right. I found Driv3r which says - GF 440 MX and Intel Extreme not supported and Splinter Cell Pandora Tomorrow GF 4MX and GF 4 Go not supported.
We all just thought it was any MX Geforce that was low rent, so again, I have learnt something new.
The weird thing is that the whole GeForce 3 range works with these games but the later GF 4 MX, a generation later didn't. But that's off topic.
when was a novice to computers i tried to stick a geforce mx 2 into a ram slot.
I remember playing GTA III on such a card. Those were the days.
LOL. I just realized I still have one of these cards laying around a pile of old HW. Great memories.
I still have my GeForce 2 MX PCI with original box, the card had so low power consumption Creative didn't even bother to put on a heatsink, but I did put one on mine. I had it in an AST Pentium 200MMX, the 2 MX replaced a 3dfx VooDoo and Matrox Mystic combo
this card was awesome to play Counter Strike smoothly back in the 2000's
I got a "Manli" GeForce 2 MX400 on January 2002 (I'm from Spain), upgrading from Riva TNT, on a Pentium II 350Mhz. I was just blown away seeing the company still exists (manli.com) and makes graphics cards, they must be only selling in Asia now. A Legendary card for sure!
EDIT: I still have my benchmarks results from 2004 (Pentium 4 2.8Ghz) with this card on 3DMark 2001 SE => 3DMark Score 2957. Pretty close to your result!
thank you for testing gta.. still great game
Had a Duron 650 oc-ed to 800MHz. The later GF2MX400 was a match made in heaven. Initially ran it with a V3-3000 but that became quite limiting with only 16bit colour and 16MB. vram.
My dad in 2001 owned a blasting/explosive compound producing company, that post 9/11 had to close down due to insurance premiums(from ~250k USD a month to millions a month), with some government BS spread in for good measure. I was 7 years old at the time, and during the bankruptcy phase of things, my dad liquidated some of the computers they used right into my lap. With some hand holding from my dad, i took apart the 5(6?) desktops he brought home. cannabilzed them into one system with the GPU being this card(mine had a blue pcb though, imo looks awesome). And i remember it barely running BF1942 and later replacing it so i could play World of Warcraft when it launched a few years later. The amount of games i played on that system still hits me with nostalgia when i remember/find said older games(ie from myabandonware) and run them on my current computer(5800x3D cpu/x570 mobo/3070 ti). Which funny enough has caused my significant other much confusion as ill switch from playing modern titles to... old games like train town deluxe/battlezone and other weird stuff, at least to normies.
Fast forward to today(two months ago 10/22; 12/22 as of writing this) my grandma passed away, and she had a storage container that we had to clean out... low and behold, that computer, in its original glory was wrapped up in a million trash bags, waiting for me to cut it open. To find out the gpu it still outputs a VGA/S-video(dvi would not work despite the socket having good contact on the board, idk why it wouldnt work tbh) in my windows 98' nostaliga system but soft locks the system anytime 3d is involved. The rest of the hardware was not usable, the athlon cpu was a paperweight, the mobo had burst caps and broken soder joints(in colorado, think the way the temps can change drastically here caused that over time), and the rest of the system was ewaste.
Really wish most of the hardware, esp the gpu still worked, as having the same hardware in a working computer today would make me tear up a bit. Luckily, i repurposed all that stuff into a nice wall mounted disessembled computer. which in doing so made me curious to have the modern view of what the performance of the card was, and lead me to your channel.
Subbed.
Did the GeForce 2 MX/MX400 only come with 32mb ram? My one has 64mb, VGA and SVideo with a fan.
I'm sure all sorts of configurations exist! I reckon 32 MB was the standard variant though.
There were even 16 MB too!
Lots of the 64MB ones where 64bit DDR as opposed to 128Bit SDR if i recall correctly.
Love your videos! Could you do a video on the worst gpus that came out in a particular gen of windows or worst gpus of each year
LOL good idea, I can think of a few. What would be your pick?
Riva TNT2 Vanta
Oh the struggle running GTA3 with this card back in the day
Another great video Phil. To answer your question about the impact the Geforce 2 MX made to my life. Absofukinglutely none. I was still using my pimped out Amiga 1200 for a few years after its release. It wasn't till i eventually got a Pentium 3 machine back in around 2003/4 ish? that i got a used Geforce 2 mx card and damn it sure was great even though it was a fairly old by then. BTW i still have my Amiga 1200 and get on the internet with it. Its something i will most likely take to the grave with me as i could never part with it.
LOL nice one :D I only know the Amiga from friends. We did have a C64 though. I got a Mist FPGA Amiga now, but I hardly use it.
Why was the GeForce 4 MX so unsuccessful. Anyone knows?
I used to Use a Nividia Geforce 2X the Mobile Integrated one, In the Apple eMac 2002 Model PowerPC G4 700Mhz
My first nVidia card was the GeForce 4 MX 440
It would be cool if you did a vid about later AGP (like the 7600GT) cards and their performance with Pentium 4 (478) CPUs as I think that would educate people on how far the P4 can go!
Great topic, I will for sure to this, but it will be a while.
I preordered the 3dfx Voodoo3 3000 and the VisionTek GeForce 3 and was active at PC LAN parties back then. Perhaps it was just because it was seen as a value card, but I can't recall anyone who actually liked the GeForce2 MX. I was under the impression that it sold so well because CPUs and motherboard chipsets didn't have integrated video back then and PC builders had to throw SOMETHING in to make the system functional. I was glad that so many were using that instead of ATi Rage II or S3 Trident graphics like so many others, but I still thought it was worse than it really was. It wasn't until I comfortably played Unreal II with the integrated GPU on a new nForce 2 board that I realized the MX series was better than people gave it credit for. My twin brother even made an Anandtech thread about it and people just scoffed. We had always been on the bleeding edge, even buying a 6800 Ultra at-launch (and a 6600GT to play around with), so we just never paid it attention before that. I do recall being disgusted when a coworker spent $300 on a 6600GT at Circuit City only to find that it had been resealed with a GeForce 2 MX 200 inside. Someone even transferred the sticker on the card that is visible through the window! He bought it to play Final Fantasy XI and, understandably, that wasn't going to cut it.
Awesome, thanks for sharing!
I owned the Asus V7700 Geforce 2 GTS. Love that card. It replaced my Voodoo4 4500 which I also loved!
first gpu i bought was a 32mb geforce2mx it was paired with a pentiumIII 866mhz on a qdi legend socket 370 motherboard, tbh everything ran great! eRacer was my first racing game on the pc. the gpu was made by sparkle. in the day they were the best brand. QDI LEGEND were the mb kings back in the day the machine was very expensive about £350 in 2000
I started with the TNT 2 m64 card 32mb from circuit city.
Very cool. Any plans for any Voodoo cards?
I've done quite a few videos with 3dfx stuff.
This was my first ever 3d graphics card.
Up until that point I'd been stuck without one.
It really was quite something as an introduction to 3d acceleration on PC.
Though of course I had an n64 since 1996, and that was putting software rendered 3d graphics to shame for quite a while.
That experience tempered how dramatic a change it was for me overall, but still compared to the PC games I'd been playing before then it was like night and day.
Ironically perhaps it's the only Nvidia graphics hardware I owned.
In fact even if you include my rather large collection of games consoles, the only other thing I have ever owned with NVIDIA graphics in it the Nintendo Switch.
Nintendo's hardware was of course designed by ArtX, at a minimum up until the Wii... (they also designed the n64 hardware it seems, even if they were still a part of SGI)
But the PS2 on my desk has some kind of graphics chip, but of course, the Nintendo Switch is only the 3rd ever console using NVIDIA tech, so that's not a huge surprise I guess.
Still, I have fond memories of my Geforce 2 MX.
Playing the original sims, bridge commander, and a bunch of other things I don't remember quite so well... XD
By 2001 this card was reduced in price to something like £100 here in the UK. It was my first proper video card. Good times!
Hello Phil, great video!.One thing someone could say is that the chip came out with 64bit and 128 bit memory bus so, 64 bit memory versions are the ones that should be avoided.
I believe these are GF2 MX 200 cards. Yes, you're right, they should be avoided. All the bad cards had slow or cut down memory.
I actually jumped from a 32mb Gigabyte TNT2 Pro straight to a 64mb Leadtek Geforce 4 ti4200, so skipped a few generations. I remember it was that now mostly forgotten 3d Command and Conquer game that made me realise the tnt2 couldn't cut it anymore. You could get away with an older video card if You were still using low resolutions for games.
Now THAT is an upgrade.
I know I am late to the game here but my Grandma pulled out her old Athlon XP 1700+ computer and gave it to me and it sports one of the smallest Geforce2 MX 200 cards I have ever seen. Only 32MB of RAM but it works quite well. I have Geforce 4 MX 440 card and not sure if the upgrade is worth it.
The GeForce 2 MX wasn't amazing, but it was affordable and got the job done which was by-far the most important thing back in the days of crippling software rendered performance and the dreaded S3 Virge (a nice basic video card for DOS but if you try its 3D acceleration on any Windows-based games you're gonna have a bad time, there's a reason they call it the "graphics *de*celerator"). Basically the GTX 1060 of its day.
By the way Phil, what drivers would you recommend most for a 2 MX 200 running on Windows 98SE?
Go with older drivers instead of latest. Pick one that is 6-12 months after the game you want to play. Usually it will give best performance and compatibility with that game.
I had a geforce 2 mx200. That was very slow card. Actually no perfomance boost from riva tnt2 vanta, that I had before upgrade. After that I've got a geforce 2 mx400 from my friend. He's father liked games and he got annoyed by mx400 perfomance. He got a geforce 4 ti 4600. And that mx400 is that I am using nowdays. It has a strange bug. When the video output in text mode (bios screen, dos prompt, even in windows dos box), the text symbols displaying with noticable delay, like they loading from slow 140 bod modem
Currently rebuilding my first new bought computer, a 1.4 AMD thunderbird and a geforce 2 (allthough I do not remeber if it had the 2 MX or the 2 MX 400, doesn't matter much though, I've got them both here. Even the keyboard I had with it is still present, a logitech wireless optical mouse with wireless keyboard, only problem atm is that I do not have enough AA batteries.
Hey Phil! Will you do a video about legendary GeForce 8 Series? You made a video about 7800 GTX. I'd like o see an 8800 GTX video! Thanks!
At some point yes, but for the time being I try not to jump back or ahead too far :)
PhilsComputerLab Thanks for reply! I am keen on to see a video about 8800 GTX! I bought it for my 2007 dreambuild and it is awesome Id like to see your review about this card.
BTW do you still own those 7800 GTX?
Phil I know you dont use older drivers for this card but when i had similar 200mx the oldest drivers was the fastest eg drivers before 12_41 those Wx95_ something . 12_41 came with the first support for directx 8 . maybe its a OS-issue :
The red ones? One died unfortunately, but I have another one, green one.
Yes I found this also that older drivers can be a bit faster. That might make a good video, but it's a lot of work testing many drivers.
Good times I had with that card back in 2000/2001 :)
I had this card paired with a P3 800mhz and 256mb ram... oh those were the days!
I remember when we were still experimenting with these cards. I flashed mine with a Quadro BIOS and it would boot up and say Quadro MXR.
Ah yes, nice! I might be doing the reverse soon :D
i actually flashed one of these cards which was a mac card that i got in a quicksilver g4 mac, flashed it to from MAC to PC, and i really have to say that after using this video card for windows 98se i was really impressed with its performance on windows. i was running it on a pIII 700mhz and it seemed that this video card helped to make the system feel alot more responsive + current and usable. Benchmarks always place the geforce 2 low on the chart but for whatever reason i really have had good experiences using this graphics chip! and the 2D performance + dual monitor support was supposed to have been game changing at the time! did they ever make a Geforce 2 Ti?
Thank you for a nostalgic breeze I had while watching Half Life : Uplink :)
I bet if you went to or checked out online a used PC parts dealer you could find a bunch of OEM Geforce 2 MX cards cheap. It was a super popular and good performer for the time, but Nivida made so much better GPU's soon after.
Totally, they are everywhere on eBay. It could be one of the most common cards to be honest.
I agree, Dell and I think Gateway used it in their higher end machines. Some Geforce 2 MX cards had a composite video jack and some card manufacturers combined it with a TV tuner. It might have been the GPU that really put Nvidia on the map.
Reminds me of my old PC using the very same card (gf2 mx/mx400) and tries to play Doom 3 back in the day at the lowest setting possible, and it's still unplayable (getting 20 fps at best).
Overclocking it to 225 MHz and fixed a 9 cm fan in front of it.
Much of the performance of MX series cards depends on the drivers, and it is not that the latest is the best. This seems to be one of the first cases of product obsolescence by newer drivers. On the optimal everything goes more smoothly than you can see on the test.
This was my first AGP card, I had it with a Pentium 2 400, 96MB of PC100 SDRAM, and a SB Live! 5.1... Sure it was a budget rig for 2001, but it was all I could afford in grade 8 and it smoked my Pentium MMX 233, Voodoo2 8MB, 32MB EDORAM, and a no name SB Compatible card. I miss those days.
Nice.
I still have a working card on my old (and my first) PC....
Buddy Can you help please ? i have a Dell Optiplex 755 which i use for my recording studio and i am looking to set up dual monitor's i need a graphics card that is cheap + silent . It does not need to be graphics intensive
Thanks ;)
I guess I got lucky and didn't even realize it until now. I wanted a pc for retro gaming, so I just bought a Win 98 machine (complete and working) online, and it has this card. I only bought the pc an hour ago, so obvi it hasn't arrived yet, but it seems like it will be a decent card for vintage gaming. I was afraid it was going to be some entry-level card that came with a business computer lol
Remember the 2-4 fps thing in Doom3. It happened to me in 2002 on Geforce 4 MX440, when first Alpha Demo was released. Could not believe, some card will run it good, because I had just new card. Got frustrated. Later, I've found of course Nvidia trick, Geforce 4 mx440 was basicaly rebadged Geforce 2. Was upset like hell, that I didnt buy Geforce 4 4200 ti instead, which was only 33% more expensive. We had screwed 2 years 2002-2004 with MX440 instead 4200 ti gaming years, I found it years later.
But in mid 2000, to buy Geforce 2 and use it till mid 2002, had to be awesome experience, I believe. I was on voodoo 2 on that time as many users, but we didnt upgrade. I remember, how in 2000,2001 and 2002, games was just too much for voodoo2, and I've started to feel the age even on lower resoltions and 16-bit. I've played Giants citizen kabuto 16-bit, 640x480 because of it. With Geforce 2, we could play it 1024x768 32-bit, for sure. It was good card for mid 2000-mid 2002 era. I would say best buy, for little money. All people, that invested in june 2000-dec 2000 into this card, and ran it for 2 years, could considered themself happy. Instead, people that paid 300$ for geforce256 SDR or DDR in dec 1999, didnt make good choice. as half year later, this 150$ card had same performance and consumed less power, and didnt have problem with some motherboards. Not sure if to waste 150$ was worth for 6-8 months of playing during nov 1999-jun 2000. Geforce2 MX after overclocking, could catch Geforce256 DDR, that costed $300 in nov 1999, and consumed 4W instead of 16W, so 4x less power.
I think the MX 400 PCI is what i had, with a Athlon XP 1500+. I remember GTA 3 running a bit crap on it, but a bit surprised considering PS2 ran the game at least 2x faster. Wonder why that is? My card after this was the ATI 9500 (non pro) and then again in 2004 for Half Life 2 with the GF 6800 Ultra.