Besides overclocking, what are the advantages of retail Geforce 2 MX's?

[Haervii]

Such as the Visiontek and the Asus V7100 (32meg) the price deifference is great, but is performance or graphics really that different?

 

[Haervii]

up goes the post...

 

[Dark4ng3l]

I dont think there are any diferences exept for the hercules witch has 5.5 ns ram retail and 7 ns oem

 

[Haervii]

Well, yes, but how much of a performance difference does the RAM make?

 

[Freeze]

A lot, especially since the Geforces are historically memory bandwidth limited. All these people who overclock the core are just further increasing the memory bottleneck (if you can't max out at default core, what makes you think that by increasing the core speed you'll get better performance?). Granted, you will see a performance increase if you OC the core, but you would see a greater % performance increase by having faster memory. Why else do you think that the MX supports such slow memory (or fast DDR on 1/2 the memory bus of SDR, ie 64bit vs 128 bit)? A 150MHz DDR (300) on a 64 bit bus will offer the same bandwidth as a 150 SDR on a 128 bit bus.... It would be too powerful if you had the same kind of memory the GF2's had, making the GF2 a waste of money.

 

[Howard]

Usually you get games bundled with retail cards.

 

[Jeff H]

I did a lot of investigating before I bought my retail Prophet II MX card, and besides the differences mentioned in other posts, there seems to be a wider variation in 2D quality among the MX cards than there is in 3D. The 2D quality is reportedly influenced by the filtering circuitry on the cards, and is one area a card manufacturer can cut costs.

That said, the two cards reportedly w/ the best 2D are the Prophet II MX and the Asus V7100 series. Now, we don't buy these kind of cards for their stunning 2D, we buy them for 3D. But, many of us still spend a good deal of our computer time in 2D appls, such as internet use and office applications.

 

[blurredvisionx]

I bought an OEM version of the Guillemot Hercules MX, and I am scoring above average on 3DMark2000. No complaints here the OEM version.

 

[Haervii]

I'll buy the V7100 which looks like the cheapest retail card, $135. I know there is a more expensive version, but both have 5ns RAM, right?