The nVidia GeForce 2 MX-400
What's old is what's new...

By, Jeff Bouton
April 23, 2001

H.H. Test System
Onwards and Upwards...


DFI CS60-EC (Intel i815EP) with an Intel PIII @ 933MHz

256MB of Mushkin 2-2-2 Rev. 2 RAM

IBM DTLA307015 15Gig ATA100 7200 RPM Hard Drive

nVidia GeForce 2 MX-400 64MB SDRAM AGP Graphics Card

Plextor PlexWriter 12/10/32

Pioneer 16/40 DVD Rom

Windows Millennium

Direct X 8.0a and nVidia reference drivers V.11.01***

 

Comparison cards used throughout testing:

nVidia GeForce 2 Ultra 64MB DDR RAM

nVidia GeForce 2 MX 32MB SDRAM

 

***You may notice that we list Detonator 11.01 drivers instead of the latest released version.  These 11.01's were provided by nVidia for our testing.  Brian Burke classified them as a "Release Candidate" that will probably be released to the public at the end of the month.

 

Benchmarks With The nVidia GeForce 2 MX-400
DX7,8, & Open GL...

 
So the first tests we threw at this card is Mad Onion's 3DMARK 2000 for our DX7 benchmark followed by 3DMARK 2001 for DX8 benching.  As we mentioned earlier,  throughout the benchmarks we've included comparisons to an original MX card and an Ultra so we can see where this new card falls in the big picture.

On to the 3D Marks...

3D MARK 2000


 

3DMARK 2001


 

Well, there you have it.  This is what you can expect to gain by tweaking up the core speed from 175MHz, to 200MHz.  Not exactly earth shattering, but it IS a gain.  Maybe the numbers will be more conclusive with the gaming test.

Our first test will be with MDK2.  MDK2 lets us test the Open GL capabilities of the card.  Let's see how we did...

MDK 2

We can see an additional 4 FPS at 1024x768x16 but that doesn't really add much considering the core is running 14% faster than the original MX shown.  1024x768x32 still doesn't hit the 60 FPS that we like to see when considering whether a resolution is playable or not.

In the next section we'll see how the card faired against our trusty Quake 3 test.  Then we'll throw in a couple of newcomers to make it more interesting....

More Benchmarks and The Rating