3D Prophet II MX PCI
Manufacturer: Hercules

Let's face it, a lot of you are on a budget and still are using Pentium PC configurations with only a PCI bus. Other bought this sparkling new PC system at a retailer to find out at home that the videocard is integrated on the mainboard (i810 motherboards) and therefore does not have a AGP port which can be used to upgrade your videocard to good quality mid-range performance.

A few manufacturers did notice this problem and saw profit(no, not Prophet) in it . Good for them as I know a lot of users will like the PCI based GeForce2 MX that we will be testing today. The little gem we have in our lab is the PCI based 3D Prophet II MX, and after you've read this entire test you'll probably agree with me, this is a great option for all those non AGP port gamers out there. But first, the big question: 'Why do we see (or want) so little PCI based videocards' The answer to this question is bandwidth. The PCI port is getting a little outdated (I expect a new faster PCI port to be released this year BTW). The problem with this older port is that it can not push data as fast as the AGP port. If you where to be in a traffic jam with your car on a 2-way road you'll have to move slowly. If that same road is a 4-way road you wouldn't have been in a traffic jam and you'd be moving much faster. This same principle applies to the PCI port versus AGP ports.

The 3D Prophet II MX PCI  offers an valuable entry price into the latest generation of super-compact "low-profile" format graphics boards with hardware transform and lighting and of course the new NVIDIA Shading Rasterizer (NSR) pipeline. The NSR allows 7 pixel operations to run in a single process, textures and lighting effects are calculated in real time in a single cycle on both pipelines..