is a GF4 MX420 pci overkill for a pIII 766?

[BigFatCow]

thanks for all your help..im getting my newegg order ready and i think im just gonna get the GF2 MX400 because i am only gonna play older games that require win98 on this machine and all the rest of the time it we just sit there and crunch seti...

 

[sirfergy]

I am surprised no one has pointed out the fact that the geforce4 mx420 is SDR while the geforce2 mx400 is ddr and has much more bandwidth available.

 

[bluemax]

Sorry, Charlie. That is incorrect. Thanks for playing. 🙂

The MX-400 and MX4-420 are BOTH SDR. Which explains their performance.

 

[FrustratedUser]

If the GF4MX line is similar to the GF2MX line then I can say this.
The SDR version (PCI) has 128bit memory bus while the DDR has 64, so, looking at benchmarks done with the GF2MX PCI line it turns out the SDR is actually slightly faster.

I have the GF2MX400 SDR PCI. It actually performs quite well. Playing RtCW @640 x 480 on a Celeron 500 and the gameplay is smooth. Crank it up to 800 x 600 and it starts to get shoppy.

I would say the GF4MX420 PCI will fit the 7xx MHz PIII quite nicely. I saw one guy with a 1.x GHz AMD and a GF2MX PCI card doing benchmarks with 3DMark2000 and he got something like 3500 points. I get 2800 with my setup so I guess the card is starting to limit performance in the 7-800MHz region.
If you don't have an AGP slot like me, you'll be happy with this card. But as mentioned above there is also the Radeon 7500 and maybe the 9000.