...
The GF2 MX400 is the 64mb SDR version with 128 bit bus I believe.

There is something seriously wrong with your scores. I don't have a Pentium III, but I believe you should be getting at least 4000 points in 3dmark99. As a reference, this should be pretty similar to your setup:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSZ256bvI9s

Pentium III 550, GF 2 MX 400, Detonator 45.23. 3DMark99 wasn't tested, but the 3DMark00 score is 4200 points.

Did you disable VSync for benchmarking? It's in the Direct3D section of your Nvidia driver settings. Might need to install the coolbits_forceware.reg file to make this option visible. Is your hard disk working properly, do you have DMA enabled? Have you tried disabling your sound card and using a PS/2 mouse?

The CPU score for 3DMark99 for a Pentium III 500 should be around 7500, so that seems to be okay at least.

Is it really a Geforce 2 MX 400 and not a crippled MX 200? You can usually tell by looking at the BIOS bootup screen, the clock speeds and the device manager label for the card. I believe I have one weird Geforce 2 MX that presents itself as a regular MX, but has extremely low, non-standard clock speeds and most likely a 64-bit bus.

asdf53 wrote on 2024-03-13, 20:27:

There is something seriously wrong with your scores. I don't have a Pentium III, but I believe you should be getting at least 40 […]
Show full quote

There is something seriously wrong with your scores. I don't have a Pentium III, but I believe you should be getting at least 4000 points in 3dmark99. As a reference, this should be pretty similar to your setup:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSZ256bvI9s

Pentium III 550, GF 2 MX 400, Detonator 45.23. 3DMark99 wasn't tested, but the 3DMark00 score is 4200 points.

Did you disable VSync for benchmarking? It's in the Direct3D section of your Nvidia driver settings. Might need to install the coolbits_forceware.reg file to make this option visible. Is your hard disk working properly, do you have DMA enabled? Have you tried disabling your sound card and using a PS/2 mouse?

The CPU score for 3DMark99 for a Pentium III 500 should be around 7500, so that seems to be okay at least.

Checking all of this and will retest 99 and 00. DMA is on but vsync was not fully disabled.
I'm already using a ps/2 mouse.

asdf53 wrote on 2024-03-13, 20:27:

There is something seriously wrong with your scores. I don't have a Pentium III, but I believe you should be getting at least 40 […]
Show full quote

There is something seriously wrong with your scores. I don't have a Pentium III, but I believe you should be getting at least 4000 points in 3dmark99. As a reference, this should be pretty similar to your setup:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSZ256bvI9s

Pentium III 550, GF 2 MX 400, Detonator 45.23. 3DMark99 wasn't tested, but the 3DMark00 score is 4200 points.

Did you disable VSync for benchmarking? It's in the Direct3D section of your Nvidia driver settings. Might need to install the coolbits_forceware.reg file to make this option visible. Is your hard disk working properly, do you have DMA enabled? Have you tried disabling your sound card and using a PS/2 mouse?

The CPU score for 3DMark99 for a Pentium III 500 should be around 7500, so that seems to be okay at least.

Is it really a Geforce 2 MX 400 and not a crippled MX 200? You can usually tell by looking at the BIOS bootup screen, the clock speeds and the device manager label for the card. I believe I have one weird Geforce 2 MX that presents itself as a regular MX, but has extremely low, non-standard clock speeds and most likely a 64-bit bus.

Device Manager Label: Geforce 2 MX/MX400 (also comes up as this on rivatuner)
On rivatuner: Core clock: 100mhz, memory clock 125mhz, says 128 bit bus on rivatuner.
DMA is on
Disabled vsync for D3D
Disabled sound card in device manager
AGP is on 2X

3D mark 99 score: 2226 3d marks, 6929 cpu 3d marks.

not sure what is wrong with my system 🙁

That's not normal, a Geforce 2 MX should have a core clock of around 160-200 MHz for the core and 166 MHz for the memory. Can you double check that with other tools, for example the overclocking tab in the Nvidia driver? Remember, you need the coolbits registry setting for that to appear.

asdf53 wrote on 2024-03-13, 21:10:

That's not normal, a Geforce 2 MX should have a core clock of around 160-200 MHz for the core and 166 MHz for the memory. Can you double check that with other tools, for example the overclocking tab in the Nvidia driver? Remember, you need the coolbits registry setting for that to appear.

Ok, in the Nvidia Overclocking Tab:

Core Clock: 200mhz
Memory Clock: 250mhz

Interesting. 250 MHz isn't possible with SDRAM, so it seems to be a DDR memory card running at 125Mhz (the Nvidia driver shows double the memory speed if it's DDR). DDR sounds good at first, but I believe there were also DDR cards that have a crippled 64-bit memory bus. What happens if you overclock the memory, does that result in a significant performance increase? If yes, then it's most likely a 64-bit card.

asdf53 wrote on 2024-03-13, 21:31:

Interesting. 250 MHz isn't possible with SDRAM, so it seems to be a DDR memory card running at 125Mhz (the Nvidia driver shows double the memory speed if it's DDR). DDR sounds good at first, but I believe there were also DDR cards that have a crippled 64-bit memory bus. What happens if you overclock the memory, does that result in a significant performance increase? If yes, then it's most likely a 64-bit card.

Well, the box that it came with says: MX400: SDR-64MB so that's odd.

Memory Clock @340mhz and Core clock @ 220mhz:
2483 GPU 3dmarks

Thank u for the help btw I appreciate it, new to this.

Edit: I just realized you said to only do the memory probably for a reason so I'm doing it again with only the memory OC.
Edit: it was 2490 with only the memory overclocked.

Something else just came to my mind - Driver 45.23 is from mid-2003, and at that point, Nvidia was exclusively selling DDR memory cards. It could be that the driver simply assumes DDR memory speeds for any card. If that's true, the card could also have regular SDRAM clocked at 125 MHz and have a 64-bit memory bus, which would be extremely crippled. Is your card from a no-name brand? They might have lied and labeled it as MX 400 when it's really a MX 200.

One GF 2 MX card I have presents itself as a Geforce 2 MX, but that's a lie, it's a Geforce 2 MX 200 with ridiculously low clock speeds (something around 140/125 Mhz).

asdf53 wrote on 2024-03-13, 21:54:

Something else just came to my mind - Driver 45.23 is from mid-2003, and at that point, Nvidia was exclusively selling DDR memory cards. It could be that the driver simply assumes DDR memory speeds for any card. If that's true, the card could also have regular SDRAM clocked at 125 MHz and have a 64-bit memory bus, which would be extremely crippled. Is your card from a no-name brand? They might have lied and labeled it as MX 400 when it's really a MX 200.

It's the same exact one as from this post. (LOL we probably bought from the same ebay seller who was selling 2 of them in the box)

Weird GeForce 2 mx400

Oh, haha. That card seems really sketchy. They could have even manipulated the BIOS to say "MX 400", who knows.

In any case, if you overclock only the card's memory and leave everything else alone, and then you get several hundred points more in 3DMark, it clearly shows that the card's memory or memory bus is your bottleneck. The only thing you can do is to overclock the memory as much as possible and see if you can get close to a regular Geforce 2 MX. But that won't be possible if yours has a 64-bit memory bus. You can probably squeeze out some more performance by switching to an older Nvidia driver (version 7.76 is supposed to be the fastest on slower CPU's), but other than that, you would have to buy another card.

You can usually tell how fast a Geforce 2 MX is by looking at the memory chips. The cheapest ones have 7ns memory and possibly a 64-bit interface, avoid these. The best ones have 4.5 or 5ns. If you find one with 5ns, it's likely a good one with 128-bit memory bus and it will also have a bit of overclocking potential.

asdf53 wrote on 2024-03-13, 22:10:

Oh, haha. That card seems really sketchy. They could have even manipulated the BIOS to say "MX 400", who knows.

In any case, if you overclock only the card's memory and leave everything else alone, and then you get several hundred points more in 3DMark, it clearly shows that the card's memory or memory bus is your bottleneck. The only thing you can do is to overclock the memory as much as possible and see if you can get close to a regular Geforce 2 MX. But that won't be possible if yours has a 64-bit memory bus. You can probably squeeze out some more performance by switching to an older Nvidia driver (version 7.76 is supposed to be the fastest on slower CPU's), but other than that, you would have to buy another card.

You can usually tell how fast a Geforce 2 MX is by looking at the memory chips. The cheapest ones have 7ns memory and possibly a 64-bit interface, avoid these. The best ones have 4.5 or 5ns. If you find one with 5ns, it's likely a good one with 128-bit memory bus and it will also have a bit of overclocking potential.

Well that sucks. Prob gonna try and return it.

What card can I get that every revision is gonna be fine? do GF4's have the same problems?
What's a different budget card I can get for my system, I wanna play games from 2000 and back on at like 600x800 mostly.

Before you go ahead and return the card, I'd try older drivers. 7.76 is a good start.
I'd also download a version of Everest from around 2004, this can give us far better insight on what card you have in your system.

Garrett W wrote on 2024-03-14, 00:41:

Before you go ahead and return the card, I'd try older drivers. 7.76 is a good start.
I'd also download a version of Everest from around 2004, this can give us far better insight on what card you have in your system.

I installed 7.76 after removing the other drivers but now everything is messed up, can't launch any programs because of "illegal operations"
- Will have to prob fresh install 98.

Edit: got 7.76 installed fine now. Running 3d mark 99

Garrett W wrote on 2024-03-14, 00:41:

Before you go ahead and return the card, I'd try older drivers. 7.76 is a good start.
I'd also download a version of Everest from around 2004, this can give us far better insight on what card you have in your system.

Here is what Everest says:
Code Name: NV11
Bus Type: AGP 4X (I think my mobo maxes out at 2x (SE440BX-2)
Memory Size: 64MB
GPU Clock: 200 MHz
RAMDAC Clock: 350mhz

Memory Bus Properties:
Bus Type: SDR
Bus Width: 128-bit
Real Clock: 250mhz
Effective Clock: 250mhz
Bandwidth: 4000 MB/s

IDK... I have no idea if it's DDR or SDR or what.

Let me know if you need anything else from Everest

Garrett W wrote on 2024-03-14, 00:41:

Before you go ahead and return the card, I'd try older drivers. 7.76 is a good start.
I'd also download a version of Everest from around 2004, this can give us far better insight on what card you have in your system.

Well, with the memory overclocked and on the 7.76 drivers I got 2600 3d marks on 3d mark 99.

Still not close to what I should be getting from what I understand

I halved the memory clock of my Geforce 2 MX 128-bit to 62 MHz and benchmarked it, and I'm getting the same result (2100 points in 3dmark99). So I really think that's what you have here, a 64-bit card with SDRAM clocked at at 125 MHz. With regular Geforce 2 MX clocks (200/166 MHz) I'm getting 3900 points.

The problem is that if your card is from a fraudulent manufacturer, you can't trust any of the values it's reporting to diagnostics software. I'm sure the BIOS can be edited to report false values, and the PCI ID can also be modified (this is what determines if the card is detected as a Geforce 2 MX 400 or 200).

You can still get the latest available drivers from Nvidia for any operating system (Product Type: Legacy): https://www.nvidia.com/Download/index.aspx?lang=en-us

But I would put my money on not having AGP 4x. Even TNT2's are AGP 4x.

asdf53 wrote on 2024-03-14, 08:14:

I halved the memory clock of my Geforce 2 MX 128-bit to 62 MHz and benchmarked it, and I'm getting the same result (2100 points in 3dmark99). So I really think that's what you have here, a 64-bit card with SDRAM clocked at at 125 MHz. With regular Geforce 2 MX clocks (200/166 MHz) I'm getting 3900 points.

The problem is that if your card is from a fraudulent manufacturer, you can't trust any of the values it's reporting to diagnostics software. I'm sure the BIOS can be edited to report false values, and the PCI ID can also be modified (this is what determines if the card is detected as a Geforce 2 MX 400 or 200).

Thank you for testing for me, I appreciate it.
Gonna return and get an FX card from a known manufacturer.