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GeForce2 MX400 vs. MX200 - BIG difference!!

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proze

proze

Senior Member
​
Joined
Dec 22, 2000
Location
Pretoria, RSA
hey peeps.

to cut a ling story short, i gave my Creative Anni Pro to my little brother, and ended up with a nasty GF2 MX200, which sucked. today i had the opportunity to sell it and get a 64MB MX400 for not much more, so i did it. both of the cards are rather cheap Hightech HK OEM cards, but look at the difference!!!!!!!!

GeForce 2 MX200: @ 200/172 (Clock/mem)
3dmark2000: 3169 - blaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh!
Q3Timedemo1: 53.5
Q3Timedemo2: 53.7
UT: Two loops of the UTbench demo: Avg: 30.36

-------------------------------------------

GeForce 2 MX400: Straight outta the box - No tweaks!!
3dmark2000: 5042
Q3Timedemo1: 85.3
Q3Timedemo2: 89.7
UT: Two loops of the UTbench demo: Avg: 36.67

the games are at 1024*768 and 32bit colour, and 3dmark2k is the default bench. nothing else in my system changed apart from the cards.

what a HUGE difference! i'm glad i took the opportunity! anyone else experience this?
 
Great example of bandwidth differences!!

No wonder so many people think Nvidia sucks, with a crippled card like that (MX-200), I would too.
 
Nice! When u have tweaked a little would u post ur results? I would like to se how much such a MX 400 could do.
 
okay this is weird... i did the coolbits hack to enable overclocking, but when it came to changing the speeds, they were all messed up! the clock slider could only go to 200mhz max, and that's meant to be default, and the mem range on the slider was zero to 100mhz. how strange is that? when i unchecked "allow clock freqencies adjustements", the sliders changed and showed 200/333 for clock/mem. wtf? so i tried nvmax, and it also says 200/333 default. have yet to try powerstrip, but i thought the mx400 was an sdr card, and ran at 200/166 stock. any ideas as to why this is happening?
 
already did.. that's what i tried second. i hate powerstrip, so i really don't want to install that. any other alternatives?
 
Riva something, I cant remember at tweakfiles. Its good.

And ya I got the mx-200 too. The box says MX, thats it. False bloody advertising.

But I sold it and got a Radeon for the same price hehe/.
 
Walter:-( (Aug 02, 2001 01:28 p.m.):
Nice! When u have tweaked a little would u post ur results? I would like to se how much such a MX 400 could do.
Click to expand...

okay, so i got the newest version of nvmax and it stil thinks the card has ddr memory. but never mind. i'm just dividing the memory figure by half when i oc it. the memory on the card is budget 6ns (166mhz) stuff, but i could benchmark at 210mhz, although i did get artifacts. the highest i can benchmark with absolutely no artifacts is 195mhz. i'm not oc'ing the core cos apparently that does no good.

at 200/195:

3dmark: 5470
q3 demo001: 97fps
q3 demo002: 102fps
ut UTbench: avg. 38fps

the game settings are as above. and d3d has 2*2low aa on, opengl has none. no other tweaks, though.
 
Thanks a lot Proze! I think it's still to slow for a T-bird 1.2GHz, don't you think so?
 
Zuck Gou :) (Aug 02, 2001 07:00 p.m.):
Riva something, I cant remember at tweakfiles. Its good.

And ya I got the mx-200 too. The box says MX, thats it. False bloody advertising.

But I sold it and got a Radeon for the same price hehe/.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I was suckered the same way.
The box said 'MX' and I thought most MX cards offered fairly similar performance. The card was set to 143/143Mhz out of the box, managed to get it to 175/160 (GPU/Mem) with reliability, but still didn't perform like a real MX should have.
I bought the GTS Pro to replace it. Performance, of course, blitzed the 'dodgy' MX, but I wasn't expecting the great improvement in clarity and focus of text. The cheap 'MX' card was quite blurry by comparison. Go figure.
 
yes sadly nvidia does sucker in people
and the retail salespeople dont help people who dont know what they are buying
nvidia did the same with the tnt2 (the m64) and this is a card made to be sold by oems to get a low price point

i have an original geforce2mx
and the only diff between this and the mx400 is the 25mhz core speed
i get get slightly better scores than you at 200/200
but thats to be expected

as for the funny results,i recommend buying name brand cards
especially when it comes to picture quality
and they tend to stick to the reference designs more
 
thanks for the post... i'm looking at an MX400 for a friend so I'll be sure to stay warry of the evil MX200... :)
 
Maestro said:
How much was the MX400 ? I have not converted to Nvidia anything yet. Just wondering,,,,

Maestro
Click to expand...

i don't live in the us, so my prices are probably much higher than yours, but this one cost me the equivalent of about US$85.00.
 
Walter:-( said:
Thanks a lot Proze! I think it's still to slow for a T-bird 1.2GHz, don't you think so?
Click to expand...

dunno. depends on how many games you play, and how you like them to look. i'm happy at 1024*768 with medium detail settings for most games, so it's fine for me. obviously i'd like a gf2 ultra or gf3, but on a student's budget that's impossible! :( i'd recommend the card as a budget card. the performance really doesn't do badly at all.
 
proze said:


dunno. depends on how many games you play, and how you like them to look. i'm happy at 1024*768 with medium detail settings for most games, so it's fine for me. obviously i'd like a gf2 ultra or gf3, but on a student's budget that's impossible! :( i'd recommend the card as a budget card. the performance really doesn't do badly at all.
Click to expand...

Once again Thanks

I do play a lot of games, so I think I'll go for the GTS PRO. The price is OK, and the performance is good.
Thanks again. :)
 
I just tweaked my GF2MX the other day, and it seems as though I got a very very nice chip on mine. The defaults are 175 core and 166 memory, but using NvMax it will run very very stable at 220 core and 185 memory. It will still run at 230 core 190 memory, but strange things appear on the screen when I run 3DMark2000 at those speeds, they sorta look like streaks and stuff (the term artifacts come to mind), hard to explain. But 220/185 sounds pretty good to me. BTW, it is a SUMA GeForce2 MX Platinum, and it kicks ***, and it only costs $72 for the retail version!!!

I saw an increase from 2150 to 2680 in my 3Dmark2000 score, and my frame rates in Counter-Strike went from about 35-40 to 60-65, almost double.
 
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try dropping your core, and seeing if you can then get your memory higher. oc'ing the core on gf2's in general doesn't do much at all, whereas oc'ing the memory makes a world of difference, as you've discovered.
 
Yea I cant really see how your doubling your FPS with that memory overclock.

Most retail brand name gf2mxs can get a higher memory than that.

Good luck bro
 
Well, I clocked down the core and brought the mem up, and it seems to top out at 220/220 vs. the old 230/185. I have yet to benchmark it though, which I will do as soon as I get the 12.90 NEDs installed, and some people report that the 12.90s will support OCing much better....we shall find out.
 
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