Sorry forgot the reason I posted. Are these clocks unusual for an mx400? Performance in 3dmark? I owned an mx400 back in 2002 but I don't remember a lot about these other than it replaced the permedia 2 that I replaced a voodoo3 2000 with when I sold it to pay for college books

Hello and welcome 😀

250 MHz SDRAM is pretty much impossible on GF2 MX. Most likely this is wrong detection by the software - it thinks you have GF2 MX DDR, happened to me as well. The real clock could be 125 MHz, albeit it is very low, even no-name MX400 should have at least 143 MHz memory clock.

200 MHz core clock is normal for MX400.

Most likely someone altered the BIOS to show the engineering message and possibly altered the default frequency. I saw that before.

The 3DMark score is rather low, but this is also caused by slow CPU. With fast CPU (like Athlon XP), regular GF2 MX or MX400 should get about 5000 points in 3DMark 2000.

Thank you! I assumed that the ram speed was wrong, but I figured it was a driver issue. I can't see any good reason to modify the bios to show what it says especially on a card worth practically nothing but I've been working on computers for decades and have seen some weird things! I also have win98 on an athlon xp 2600 that currently has a ti 4200 in it so might have to stick this in there.

I have an early Geforce3 card with that same "Engineering Release" BIOS message.
Can you get a picture showing the markings on the RAM chips? That would help determine what clock they should be capable of, and could also date the card.
If you end up removing the heatsink, a picture of the markings on the GPU might also tell somebody if it's anything unusual.
Somebody might have just flashed an early BIOS on it for some reason, but it could also be a prerelease card. Date codes and maybe a GPU revision could corroborate that.

What driver version were you using and what settings did you test 3DMark 2000 with? Scores can vary a lot depending how it's set up.
My original MX got ~3000 in the default test (1024x768x16bpp) with a K6-3 450MHz on a VIA chipset - but it needed early drivers (single digit range) to score that well.
With a P3-650 on a 440BX it should be a lot faster. I'd think it wouldn't be as sensitive to driver versions either, but I've never experimented with drivers on a P3.

I'd have to check the drivers. As for the ram its blank I checked with a bright light and got nothing, no label at all. Maybe they've been scrubbed?

Nvidia driver version 4.13.01.4104. this driver was on the disk that came in the box with the card, retail box
3dmark2000- 2136, 2123
Default settings @ 1024x768 16 bit color, 16 bit textures
16-bit Z-buffer triple frame buffer
D3d hardware t&l optimizations.

I just noticed in your picture there's a 0326 date code on the PCB.
I don't know exactly when the MX400 cards came out but I think it must have been in 2001 - so that card is much too new to be a prerelease card. So it's weird that it has that BIOS on it, unless there's some other reason that "Engineering Release" BIOSes would still be used on non-retail cards after the production version has already come out.

It's also strange that the markings on the RAM chips have been removed. This card is suspicious, I wonder if it's not from a licensed manufacturer. If so then they weren't obliged to follow any rules from NVidia, so there's no telling what parts they could have used. Maybe they used cheap RAM and really did clock it at 125MHz.
An original MX had the RAM clocked at 166MHz, and I think most "normal" MX400s kept that the same, but with a faster GPU clock. These cards are limited by RAM speed more than the GPU, so this is an unfortunate handicap.

I'm not sure but I think the last 4 digits of the nvidia driver version are the "version" that we normally see when downloading them. So I think yours is what would normally be called version 41.04 (could be wrong though).
I don't know what the ideal version would be but it looks like version 12.41 supports the MX400. It might be faster.

It was labeled Apollo came in what appears to be original box and the model numbers match I figured it was the same Apollo that made the bloody monster cards, which I'm only familiar because of the name.
When I get the chance I'll download some older drivers.

This is not some rare model.
The big bios chip makes yours look ancient. Or even cheaper. Better backup the bios before doing anything else.

I didn't think it was rare so much as odd. Its an mx400 there were probably millions made even this model. it just didn't act like I expected and the bios splash screen threw me

After further experimenting and testing I found that the core is likely 200mhz and the ram is indeed 125mhz. small overclock of 10 mhz increases performance in 3dmark almost 200 points . I still wonder at the discrepancy between the bios reporting and the detected clock. Its ok though for the system it's In and it has better image quality and DOS performance than the tnt2 m64 I was running.
If it had better DOS compatibility I would have stuck with either the permedia3 or the diamond firegl1 both have superb windows image quality.