It is possible that the PCI 2.1 bus on the 430VX and the PII is not compatible with that particular GF2MX. When it won't even power on and you've tried other PCI slots that seems likely. The P4 has PCI 2.2 or 2.3.

This may not help much, but, have you cleared the cmos and removed/disabled everything other than the geforce 2.
Like swaaye said, it is more looking like the pci version mismatch between the board and the card.
Out of curiosity, is there a setting in the Packard Bell bios to force it to boot from the onboard video with the geforce 2 inserted?

Thanks for the input both of you. I did try removing everything except the geforce 2 and there is nothing in the bios related to the video output. I guess it just auto-detects VGA cards. I had a feeling there wasn't much I would be able to do about it, guess I'm gonna have to buy a TNT2 M64 cause it's about the only other card I can find in my price range, should not make much difference in this system I imagine. It will probably be pretty CPU bound.

I have a mx200 PCI that I use in my compaq EN. Its not a terrible card for an older PCI only machine. I don't think the card is very more powerful at all then a TNT2, as a matter of fact I have a suspicion that the AGP TNT2 pro and ultra are more powerful but don't quote me on that.

Have you found a manual for that Packard Bell? Its very possible theirs a jumper on the motherboard to disable the onboard video although if neither works when the Geforce is inserted I'd imagine something just isnt quite right.

card is too new indeed, but wont benefit from the power anyways.
Tried a old radeon pci?
i'd get a v3 myself for a p1

This is the closest thing to a manual I have been able to find:

http://www.uktsupport.co.uk/pb/mb/810.htm

It's a PB810 motherboard and that page says: "Installing a video expansion card will automatically disable the on board video controller." Which I believe is correct since I'm about 99% sure I didn't change any jumpers when I put the Voodoo3 in the other one I had since I would have been about 12 years old when I installed that video card in it and I'm pretty sure I didn't even know what jumpers were at 12.

Unfortunately everything else I have around is AGP. My long term plan is to get a Voodoo3 2000 PCI for it just like my original one had but at the moment I can't justify spending more then about ~$15 on a card. The MX200 will find a home in a Pentium 3 board I have sitting on the back burner most likely. It's part of the reason I picked the card even though it was too new, I figured when I eventually got a Voodoo3 I could reuse it in that Pentium 3. So no big deal really.

I've played around with plenty Pentium 1 era PB machines and there's usually no need to mess with a jumper when adding a new card. It probably has to do with some PCI slot incompatibility, perhaps because it uses a riser card? I've had cards act weird with riser setups before.

heres more info on the 810MB but probably not much more then you already know.
http://j12345.users1.50megs.com/menu/pb810/

Thanks very much for the link. Seems like it's a little bit more detailed version of what's on the link I posted. Well, I guess I'm off to buy a TNT2. If this one doesn't work I may just give up until I get a V3. From what I can tell the TNT2 M64 is PCI 2.1 "so I should be good to go", famous last words.

So interesting aside to this story. I purchased the TNT2 online and it should arrive pretty soon BUT I picked up a box of video cards today for free, got about 6 or so all AGP from about 98-08 mostly nvidia OEM stuff and in the box was one PCI Geforce2 MX400 and guess what... it works in the Packard Bell. So now I'm not sure what to do. I need to find a better driver because I downloaded the lastest driver for it just to get something working which doesn't seem to be too Win95 friendly since it slows my boot up to a crawl. I may put the TNT2 in anyway when it arrives and do some benchmarking. The 2D doesn't seem any faster then the S3 Trio64 but it sure smokes it at Quake. Also got a Voodoo Banshee in the box but it's AGP so my PentiumII is getting an upgrade from it's rage128 to the Banshee and now I have something with GLIDE! It's a good day around here if you can't tell. Also got a slot Athlon and a bunch of other cool stuff, AWE64, Audigy2, etc. not too bad for free.

One last note on this. After doing some benchmarking with the TNT2 M64 32mb PCI and what I thought was a MX400 32mb PCI but it turns out is actually a 32mb MX200(the drivers pick it up as a MX400/MX). With driver version v12.41 the MX200 gets 46fps and the TNT2 gets 28 fps in Quake 1 at 640x480x16. So it looks like even though the MX200 must be CPU bound, it still out performs the TNT2 M64 by quite a bit in a 233mhz P55C. So for anyone looking for a cheap card for a setup this old, it's worth getting but if your going for PCI, you may be rolling the dice on a the fact that your board can support it. Overall, I'm pretty happy with it.

From my testing a Geforce 2 MX 200 is still a bit faster than a TNT 2 Ultra, which is pretty good really. Interesting is that the memory bandwidth on the TNT2 Ultra is about double that of the MX 200, so nvidia must have made some improvements on the Geforce.

The Geforce MX 4000 is basically a very cut down Geforce 4 MX, closer to a Geforce 2 MX but with again improved memory bandwidth algorithms, I have a PCI one with only a 32bit memory bus that works surprisingly well.

The Geforce cards are good for old machines due to HW T&L, so Quake 3 works much better on these cards then TNT2/Voodoo etc on Pentium 1 age machines.

GeForce2 MX has double the texturing rate compared to the TNT hardware and that will certainly help in many cases. Maybe it's more efficient too since it's newer tech. GF4MX is certainly vastly more efficient.

Yes it seems to be. Surprising because everyone always said that the Geforce 2 was memory bandwidth starved. Even the Geforce 1 with DDR was a big improvement over the SDR version.

A GeForce2 MX 400 is a bit faster than a GeForce 256 SDR, but certainly slower than a DDR. GeForce 4 MX 440, on the other hand, is on par with the GeForce2 Ultra. Not too shabby at the time of release.

mwdmeyer wrote:

Yes it seems to be. Surprising because everyone always said that the Geforce 2 was memory bandwidth starved. Even the Geforce 1 with DDR was a big improvement over the SDR version.

Geforce 2 GTS was solidly bottlenecked by RAM. Considering GF2MX is basically a halved GTS, it probably has the same bottleneck. MX200 is surely extremely bottlenecked. I guess TNT2 had more bandwidth than it could use.

Riva 128 has more bandwidth than MX 200. 😀

But it is difficult to know how older architectures used their RAM. NV surely kept making improvements for better utilization.

see the gain from 166 to 200 on the MX400, clearly showing a memory bandwidth constrained performance when only the memory clock change is delivering almost the same % gain

considering the MX 200 was the same GPU with 25MHz less but with half the memory bandwidth, yes, it was awfully memory bandwidth bottlenecked, not a well balanced card at all...

for the Geforce 4 MX I think memory bandwidth usage was a lot more efficient (and they had much higher clock anyway)

I don't disagree that the Geforce 2 series was bandwidth starved, I just think it is impressive that a Geforce 2 MX 200 with about half the memory bandwidth of the TNT2 is still faster, so there were improvements.

And the MX400 was pretty pointless as it just increased the GPU clock and not the actual memory, I suspect fast memory was still very expensive back then.

Everyone always hated the MX200 back in the day, but really it was an okay cheap card.