Nvidia Geforce2 MX
Estimated Price: $110 USD
Now this was an obvious
choice. The Geforce2 MX holds the crown when it comes to value gaming. The only
thing budget about this cards is it's price tag. The
performance is right up there with the big players (almost equal to Voodoo
5500 in terms of performance). Based on the same core as it's bigger
brother, the Geforce2 GTS, the Geforce2 MX supports all the modern features
of the other Geforce boards, in addition to Digital Vibrance Control to give
you unparalleled image quality, and of course the option of TwinView.
Although chocked by it's sluggish SDR memory, this board still packs quite a
punch for a small price tag. And oh yeah, let's not forget the powerful
hardware T&L unit.
Check out our full reviews:
- Hercules - 3D Prophet II MX
- Elsa Gladiac
MX
ATI Radeon 64MB/32MB
Estimated Price: $240/$160 USD
If there is anyone that
gave Nvidia a good scare this year, it would have to be ATI. The Radeon
came
as a surprise in an Nvidia & 3dfx dominated market. Initially, the
Radeon actually surpassed the mighty Geforce2 GTS in 32bit and high
resolution benchmarks, although the victory was short lived as Nvidia
released the Det3 drivers soon after, which won back Nvidia the performance
crown. Nevertheless, ATI has implemented some very good technology in this
board and they have proved that they have what it takes to fight it out in the PC
gaming industry. The Radeon features a powerful Hardware T&L engine,
Pixel Tapestry engine, in addition to HyperZ which sufficiently decreases memory bandwidth restrictions. All this and a dozen other exclusive features
made this card a winner.
Check out our full review:
Nvidia Geforce2 GTS 64MB/32MB
Estimated Price: $280/$170 USD
Does this card
need any introduction? I would hope not. The reasons why this board should
be in any mid-range gaming
system are obvious. Firstly, it's fast, secondly,
it's fast and thirdly, it's fast. The Geforce2 core,
with 4
rendering pipelines and clocked at a blazing 200MHz, can pump put an
impressive number of pixels per second. The DDR memory however is much
slower than the core, thus resulting in a bottleneck. The only thing keeping
this beast at bay is the memory bandwidth or lack there of. Nevertheless,
the Geforce2 is the only video card at the moment that can provide us with
such performance in it's price range. Imagine 35-40 FPS in Quake 3, with all
graphical options on max on a screen resolution of 1600x1200! This is where
hardcore gaming is at.
Use the Geforce, Luke.
Check out our full reviews:
- Leadtek GeForce2 GTS
- Hercules Prophet IIGeForce2 3D
- Creative Labs Annihilator 2 Creative
- Outrageous GeForce2 GTS
- Gigabyte Ga-GF2000 GeForce2
- Abit Siluro GeForce2 64MB
