Unsure of which GeForceMX card to buy?

[ddasilva]

Hello there I have been researching a lot with the video cards and I have narrowed it down to the GeforceMX. Right now I am looking at the V7100 from Asus (w/o tv out). Should I look at another manufacturer or is Asus the best?

I have also thought about getting a Radeon but I am unsure. I need a card that will do some word processing (homework), barely any graphics and probably some games...I am buying this new compuiter and I don't want games to lag due to a crap video card

Any suggestions are appreciated thanks
Derek

 

[shabby]

If price is an issue than the VisionTek gefoce2 mx is the cheapest. Is it better/worse than the asus v7100? I doubt it, maybe its a different design but its still the same card.

 

[krazynammer]

My eVGA MX has 5.5ns ram and it rocks!

 

[Mem]

They are more or less the same unless you want to overclock,I hear the Hercules(Guillemot) overclocks really well,even if you buy a lesser known brand it will still overclock up to some point.

BTw this info above is for all standard 128bit SDRAM MX boards, the MX DDR Boards are 64bit with lower performance

 

[audreymi]

Not all MX cards are created equal. Some have a 128 wide bus with
SDRAM (128 bits of info on each clock edge) or
a 64 bit DDR (highway half as wide as 128 but cars are
double deckered). To complicate matters,
Nvidia quotes the effective SDR rate even
for DDR products. So their 175/360 DDR designation is equivalents
to ATI's 175/180 DDR designation. ATI's designation is
in line, while Nvidia's is something made up by Nvidia's marketing
department using the philosopy that bigger number is better.
This is from a Anandtech review:

• 
  By halving the memory bus width and doubling the amount of data that can travel
  along this bus in a cycle, the 64-bit DDR GeForce2 MX based cards should end
  up performing identical to the 128-bit SDR MX cards. Indeed, both types of
  cards feature the same memory bandwidth of 2.7 GB/s. The truth of the matter is
  that we may see the 128-bit SDR cards performing slightly faster than the
  64-bit DDR cards due to the fact that SDR memory is theoretically more efficient
  than DDR memory.
  
  So why use a 64-bit DDR configuration in a GeForce2 MX based product. Well,
  first off, this setup may prove to be slightly cheaper to produce when compared
  to the 128-bit SDR cards. It is true that DDR memory is more pricey than SDR
  memory, however the money spent using DDR memory is money saved when
  producing only a 64-bit wide memory bus. Since the smaller the width of the
  memory bus, the less internal traces are necessary in the board, production
  costs are decreased. The second reason for using DDR memory its marketing
  value. As we mentioned above, users who see the letters DDR equate this to
  higher performance. If two cards were placed on a store shelf next to one
  another, one boasting DDR memory and the other using SDR memory, the vast
  majority of users would pick the "faster" DDR product giving the two are the same
  price.
  

It took a retail salesman at Futureshop on a slow afternoon
to explain all of this to me. I read a
MX review at Anandtech that explains a lot of this.
I did not find the Anandtech review to be representative of my experience
with the MX card at the store but found it to more in line
with a review linked below.

I ended buying a Radeon 32 MB DDR (128 wide and double decker so
that it is equal to a 256 wide SDR running at 183MHz).
The game aspect was more for my son while the 2D is just
magnificient with 17" Sony monitor that I bought at the same time.

If you want to spend a bit less, the SDR are also very good.
Take a look at the Value Video Roundup.

I have also read that some Radeon users have push the card up to 1920x1440
with good text quality.