bobsmith wrote on 2023-05-11, 13:12:

I am looking into building a Socket 370 machine and was led to the GF2 MX400. I would love a Voodoo 3 but they're way too overpriced. Anyone know what brand of card to look for? I've heard about poor 2D output on some cheaper cards.

Also a miscellaneous question, anyone know if the GF2 is capable of playing DVD?

ASUS was a great choice back in the day as far as overall quality was concerned.

If by DVD-playback you mean hardware accelerated decoding, that was usually more contingent on the type of player you used (In the Win9x days WinDVD and PowerDVD were the most well-reviewed, I think). For Windows 95, you need to install a UDF-driver to be able to read DVDs. On Windows 98, installing one of these commercial players was enough, I think, to be able to decrypt the contents for video playback.

Unaccelerated software decoding only requires about a 350 MHz Pentium II, though, so anything faster than that means you're probably in the clear regardless of your video card.

If you are price conscious, I would scour ebay for a well made OEM offering.
Dell for example made released some nice ghost built cards that while plain in appearance work just as well as their retail cousins.
You just have to do some research as the part numbers aren't always obvious.
I also picked up a lesser known brand, a PixelView MX440 that has MX460 clocks for really cheap.
Asus is also a great choice.

Asus seems to be pretty reliable from personal experience and the 2D quality at least in my eyes is no different from a good matrox card.

I wouldn’t worry too much, the filter bypass was pretty simple to do on these cards to restore the output signals.

Obviously a good quality card would negate the need, but I’d just focus on buying a known-good card from any brand.

GeForce2 MX400 are relatively cheap. I'd say buy 2-3 of the cheapest you can find and see which one you like better. Going after a specific model/brand can be difficult and end up spending more than you wanted. Also take a look at the GF4MX cards, they share lot of the technology but are slightly faster. Just don't fall for the GF2MX200.

You'll be fine with whichever brand that you find. I think the most common ones you'll see in the wild are ASUS V7700 and Hercules 3D Prophet II. You'll also see the occasional Leadtek Winfast card and maybe a Creative 3D Blaster Annihilator 2 (but people seem to hoard Creative stuff for whatever reason).

If you're patient, you can find a Geforce 2 Ultra reference card for an arm and a leg. You can also get a Quadro2 Pro. Those two are a lot more rare, but those will have no compromises.

I'm not familiar with brands in the MX line. By the time the Geforce 4MX line came out, there were more brands than you could name. For example, I had a random Chaintech Geforce 4 MX440 thrown in a box with something else I bought. I've been meaning to see if it works, but my Geforce 2 GTS win on style points 😁

I grabbed a Leadtek GeForce 2 GTS for about $30 two years ago, and it's been rock solid stable for me aside from a dead fan. I've made sure that there's enough air movement across the heatsink and I'm not overclocking it, and so far it's behaved well in my Windows 98 PC.

ELSA and Hercules had the best image quality during that era, if that's your main priority.

None of GeForce 2 series had full MPEG2 decoding. Nvidia first implemented it in GeForce 4 MX.

Honestly a good quality fx 5200 even 64bit isn't that bad.

Gainward made some overclocked GeForce2 MX 400 cards that usually overclock even further due to their PCB design and faster VRAM (4ns or 3.5ns). If you're dead set on GF2 MX400 those are certainly among the best.👍
http://ixbtlabs.com/articles/gf2mx400gainward … pert/index.html
http://www.thg.ru/graphic/20010625/print.html
If you're looking at other GF2 MX 400 cards I believe Nvidia limited their DDR interface to 64bit. Usually that makes SDR cards with 128bit memory faster.

Other than that GeForce2 GTS and Ti are still plentiful and not too expensive. All reference PCBs have decent video output quality too.😎 Imho they're the better cards to pair with a Pentium III.

DDR MX cards usually had better memory though, which means better overclocking.