GeForce 2 MX / MX 400 cards (128 bit memory bus versions) are, in my opinion, the best video cards for SS7. Now, the bad part is the fact that 2D quality on these ranges from very good (ELSA cards, for example), to extremely bad (90% of all the GeForce 2 cards on the market). This can be solved by removing the card’s RFI filtering, but this option is probably not for everyone. And, on top of that, you will also mostly find OEM GeForce 2 MX 400 cards that are severely crippled with a 64 bit memory bus. But, if you are careful and do some research when purchasing a GeForce 2 MX, you can find good ones for cheap.

Anyway, based on all my tests, the GeForce 2 MX cards are very compatible, fast and stable on SS7 (at least on VIA MVP3, have yet to try them on Ali Aladdin V).
Some of the advantages of using a GeForce 2 MX:
- they have very low power consumption - 4 watts (and this is extremely important, because many SS7 boards have an underpowered AGP slot)
- they are also some of the fastest cards for SS7, when using a period correct driver. Also, they support Hardware T&L, which, according to Anandtech, can also improve performance in games that don’t necessarily support hardware T&L out of the box, such as Quake 2 (and this is also my experience, I’ve been able to hit 90+ FPS in Quake 2, which is A LOT for a SS7 platform).
- great Windows 98 game compatibility, having support for 8 bit paletted textures and Fog table
- great DOS game support
- still very cheap, with some digging you can find a good GeForce 2 MX card for < $10

If you enjoy Glide games, you can eventually pair the GeForce card with a good ol’ Voodoo 2 and you’ll have a great combo (although 2D quality will be affected by such a combo, especially on some Voodoo 2 cards / VGA passthrough cables - but this is a whole different topic) 😀

I never had issues with nVidia drivers on Windows 98, especially not on a rock-stable platform such as 440BX. And I tried many over the years 😀
Just make sure that you are not using newer cards, because they have higher power requirements (which can be a problem for older AGP implementations), and their drivers were not tested to work on slow CPUs, thus the performance will be severely impacted. Having said that, I even tested GeForce 3 Ti / GeForce 4 Ti cards on 440BX boards without encountering a single issue, so the problems you are describing are strange...

bloodem wrote on 2020-06-01, 05:58:

GeForce 2 MX / MX 400 cards (128 bit memory bus versions) are, in my opinion, the best video cards for SS7. Now, the bad part is […]
Show full quote

GeForce 2 MX / MX 400 cards (128 bit memory bus versions) are, in my opinion, the best video cards for SS7. Now, the bad part is the fact that 2D quality on these ranges from very good (ELSA cards, for example), to extremely bad (90% of all the GeForce 2 cards on the market). This can be solved by removing the card’s RFI filtering, but this option is probably not for everyone. And, on top of that, you will also mostly find OEM GeForce 2 MX 400 cards that are severely crippled with a 64 bit memory bus. But, if you are careful and do some research when purchasing a GeForce 2 MX, you can find good ones for cheap.

Anyway, based on all my tests, the GeForce 2 MX cards are very compatible, fast and stable on SS7 (at least on VIA MVP3, have yet to try them on Ali Aladdin V).
Some of the advantages of using a GeForce 2 MX:
- they have very low power consumption - 4 watts (and this is extremely important, because many SS7 boards have an underpowered AGP slot)
- they are also some of the fastest cards for SS7, when using a period correct driver. Also, they support Hardware T&L, which, according to Anandtech, can also improve performance in games that don’t necessarily support hardware T&L out of the box, such as Quake 2 (and this is also my experience, I’ve been able to hit 90+ FPS in Quake 2, which is A LOT for a SS7 platform).
- great Windows 98 game compatibility, having support for 8 bit paletted textures and Fog table
- great DOS game support
- still very cheap, with some digging you can find a good GeForce 2 MX card for < $10

If you enjoy Glide games, you can eventually pair the GeForce card with a good ol’ Voodoo 2 and you’ll have a great combo (although 2D quality will be affected by such a combo, especially on some Voodoo 2 cards / VGA passthrough cables - but this is a whole different topic) 😀

I never had issues with nVidia drivers on Windows 98, especially not on a rock-stable platform such as 440BX. And I tried many over the years 😀
Just make sure that you are not using newer cards, because they have higher power requirements (which can be a problem for older AGP implementations), and their drivers were not tested to work on slow CPUs, thus the performance will be severely impacted. Having said that, I even tested GeForce 3 Ti / GeForce 4 Ti cards on 440BX boards without encountering a single issue, so the problems you are describing are strange...

Thanks for your feedback. I just so many issues with Super 7 AGP and NVidia drivers on Windows 9x that after weeks of trying, my frustration was just too much. I actually had much fewer issues on my 440BX system, but my experience on the Super 7 platform left a bad taste in my mouth for NVidia cards and Windows 9x in general. Having said that I tried an unofficial driver version 82.69 on my 440BX system and that seems to have fixed all remaining issues running a GeForce 4 Ti 4200. Guess I just needed a little nudge in that direction:)

I found a TnT goes great on ss7, using 8.05 druvers

jasa1063 wrote on 2020-06-01, 18:49:

Thanks for your feedback. I just so many issues with Super 7 AGP and NVidia drivers on Windows 9x that after weeks of trying, my frustration was just too much. I actually had much fewer issues on my 440BX system, but my experience on the Super 7 platform left a bad taste in my mouth for NVidia cards and Windows 9x in general. Having said that I tried an unofficial driver version 82.69 on my 440BX system and that seems to have fixed all remaining issues running a GeForce 4 Ti 4200. Guess I just needed a little nudge in that direction:)

You’re welcome.
I hope you did not try the GeForce 4 Ti on SS7. 😀 That’s the wrong card for such a slow and buggy platform. I think the power usage for it is 20 - 25 watts, which is insane for SS7, and I’m sure a lot of boards will have issues with it (freezes, restarts, etc). And even if you find a SS7 board that is able to provide enough power for it, the card will be MUCH slower than older cards such as the GeForce 2.
For SS7 you want a VERY old driver (7.xx / 8.xx ), which means that you need a much older graphics card. And, again, avoid power hungry cards (such as the GeForce 256, GeForce 3). Heck, I even had issues with a Voodoo 3 on one of my SS7 boards, because the 15 watt power usage was too much for its AGP slot. Some higher quality SS7 boards can handle more demanding cards, but most can’t.

bloodem wrote on 2020-06-01, 05:58:

GeForce 2 MX / MX 400 cards (128 bit memory bus versions) are, in my opinion, the best video cards for SS7. Now, the bad part is […]
Show full quote

GeForce 2 MX / MX 400 cards (128 bit memory bus versions) are, in my opinion, the best video cards for SS7. Now, the bad part is the fact that 2D quality on these ranges from very good (ELSA cards, for example), to extremely bad (90% of all the GeForce 2 cards on the market). This can be solved by removing the card’s RFI filtering, but this option is probably not for everyone. And, on top of that, you will also mostly find OEM GeForce 2 MX 400 cards that are severely crippled with a 64 bit memory bus. But, if you are careful and do some research when purchasing a GeForce 2 MX, you can find good ones for cheap.

Anyway, based on all my tests, the GeForce 2 MX cards are very compatible, fast and stable on SS7 (at least on VIA MVP3, have yet to try them on Ali Aladdin V).
Some of the advantages of using a GeForce 2 MX:
- they have very low power consumption - 4 watts (and this is extremely important, because many SS7 boards have an underpowered AGP slot)
- they are also some of the fastest cards for SS7, when using a period correct driver. Also, they support Hardware T&L, which, according to Anandtech, can also improve performance in games that don’t necessarily support hardware T&L out of the box, such as Quake 2 (and this is also my experience, I’ve been able to hit 90+ FPS in Quake 2, which is A LOT for a SS7 platform).
- great Windows 98 game compatibility, having support for 8 bit paletted textures and Fog table
- great DOS game support
- still very cheap, with some digging you can find a good GeForce 2 MX card for < $10

If you enjoy Glide games, you can eventually pair the GeForce card with a good ol’ Voodoo 2 and you’ll have a great combo (although 2D quality will be affected by such a combo, especially on some Voodoo 2 cards / VGA passthrough cables - but this is a whole different topic) 😀

I never had issues with nVidia drivers on Windows 98, especially not on a rock-stable platform such as 440BX. And I tried many over the years 😀
Just make sure that you are not using newer cards, because they have higher power requirements (which can be a problem for older AGP implementations), and their drivers were not tested to work on slow CPUs, thus the performance will be severely impacted. Having said that, I even tested GeForce 3 Ti / GeForce 4 Ti cards on 440BX boards without encountering a single issue, so the problems you are describing are strange...

I've recently been reading up a lot on the MX cards again (partially because I want to go through all of my stuff again soon). Is the GF2 MX400 64bit a DDR card instead of an SDRAM one? It would be great if there was a way to distinguish the many different variants without having to go on model number and could make for an interesting page with lots of pics once I get around to it 😜

No, there's no DDR version for GeForce 2 MX. They all come with SDRAM and 64 bit or 128 bit memory bus. You will only see DDR on GeForce 2 GTS / Pro / Ti / Ultra.
Unfortunately, there's no easy way to distinguish them... or, well, the 64 bit versions do look cheaper, they don't have a fan, and they have very small heatsinks. The 128 versions tend to look much better, with better components, bigger heatsinks or even a fan. Another interesting fact that I noticed is that the vast majority of crippled GeForce 2 MX cards tend to have 64 MB VRAM instead of 32 MB (this is definitely not always the case, but just something I noticed).
I ended up searching on Anandtech / Tomshardware for reviews, looking for specific model names for cards from Asus, Elsa, Creative, etc.

I for one bought my cards from elektromyne.com, and they still have some of them. For example, this is one of the BEST GeForce 2 MX cards that you can buy: https://www.electromyne.de/Graphics-Cards-AGP … ideo-Board.html
It has great 2D quality at all resolutions, 128 bit memory bus, and can also take quite a bit of memory overclocking, for even more bandwidth.

bloodem wrote on 2020-06-02, 17:24:

No, there's no DDR version for GeForce 2 MX.

No, there is quite a standard 64 bit DDR model.
It performs measurably worse than 128 bit SDR cards though.

Putas wrote on 2020-06-02, 19:19:

No, there is quite a standard 64 bit DDR model.
It performs measurably worse than 128 bit SDR cards though.

You are right! I just saw an article on Anandtech mentioning them. Strange that those are slower, technically they should have the same fillrate/bandwidth that the 128bit SDR versions have.
Anyway, I had never heard of GeForce 2 MX DDR cards until now. I do have many 64bit SDRAM GeForce 2 MX 400 cards, though, and those are extremely slow at anything higher than 800 x 600.

bloodem wrote on 2020-06-07, 06:25:

You are right! I just saw an article on Anandtech mentioning them. Strange that those are slower, technically they should have the same fillrate/bandwidth that the 128bit SDR versions have.

The difference is latency. The peak transfer rate is the best case scenario and doesn't factor in the setup times or whatever (I'm probably not saying it quite right). Those penalties are higher with DDR then they are with SDR.
Since 64bit DDR and 128bit SDR have the same peak throughput, the simpler memory technology with less latency ends up winning.
Same principle carries forward to later types of memory which continued to add more latency penalties.

I remember running into this back when I got a Geforce2 MX at Christmas back then. I started with a Creative card which was controversial because it was the first well-known GF2MX card to use 64-bit DDR instead of 128-bit SDR. Of course they advertised this as a feature (DDR Memory! Wow!) but everybody's benchmarks showed it was actually a bit slower than the 128bit SDR cards everybody else was selling.

I guess I was sort of lucky because at the time I couldn't get that card to work on my Super-7 machine, so I returned it. After I figured out the first thing I had been doing wrong, I got another card which I actually kept, and that one was a Hercules card with 183MHz SDR. So I went from the slowest to the fastest of the original MX cards available at that time.

I didn't find out until recently that 64-bit SDR cards existed, but I guess they came along later. Shameful.

I suppose the DDR MX400 being faster or slower would also depend on how high the memory is clocked,
the reference MX400 had 175Mhz 128bits ram, the DDR had 166(333) AFAIK, but realistic most SDR MX400 were also running at 166.

MX400 with 64bits SDR feels like a scam, Nvidia had a name for it... MX200.

shamino wrote on 2020-06-07, 08:02:

The difference is latency. The peak transfer rate is the best case scenario and doesn't factor in the setup times or whatever (I'm probably not saying it quite right). Those penalties are higher with DDR then they are with SDR.
Since 64bit DDR and 128bit SDR have the same peak throughput, the simpler memory technology with less latency ends up winning.
Same principle carries forward to later types of memory which continued to add more latency penalties.

Indeed, that makes sense...

SPBHM wrote on 2020-06-07, 08:11:

MX400 with 64bits SDR feels like a scam, Nvidia had a name for it... MX200.

Yeah, I see it as a scam too. The GPU is in fact an MX400, so they advertised it as such. 😀 However, they cut corners for everything else, including memory bus and overall build quality.