Which GeForce2?

[mustafaali]

Hello,

Purchasing a GeForce2 MX, which video card manufacturer would you recommend? Reliability is my primary concern. TV-out would be a plus, but not required. Moreover, some versions have DVD software included; do these boards support hardware DVD-decoding?

System Specs:
P3, 1GHz/133Mhz
128MB SDRAM
16x DVD-ROM
15-inch IBM E54 Monitor

 

[stran]

If i could afford it i would get the Asus V7100 because its got (i heard) very overclockable Hyundai SDRAM, but instead im going to buy a MX-400 variant which is $50AU cheaper than the V7100. On the other hand if you've recently won lotto then get a Geforce 3! and maybe one for me.

 

[TheCorm]

All MX's are fairly similar, and they are cheap because they have been replaced by the MX200 and MX400 revisions.

They all support DVD Hardware acceleration but not actual decoding. So long as you have a 400mhz+ CPU and any MX you will be able to use PowerDVD or WinDVD fine.

I have an ELSA VIVO and I'm quite pleased although the Ravisent DVD software bundled does not have a Software decoder so you would need to buy a Hardware decoder card, the 2 mentioned before are good bits of software.

3d Power cards are quite good and tend to be cheap, the TV Out version comes with a fan too. Creative's one is popular but it has 64 bit DDR rather than the better option of 128 bit SDR plus it has no fan or heatsink.

Corm

 

[mustafaali]

V7100 does seem to have a lot of features but is it compatible with the Unified Driver of nVidia? Can Asus be trusted to update their driver releases with every nVidia update?

This is a concern to me as my first 3d card - Macronix Voodoo Rush - was incompatible with the 3dfx drivers. I had to write my own drivers to get Glide3 working!