Tetrium wrote:

Tbh, I've actually used a GF2MX to my satisfaction once or twice! :D […]
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tayyare wrote:

Yeah, we know... Just like 640KB was the largest memory that anyone would have required for the next century, eh? 🤣

To say the truth, GF4 MX440 is from 2002 and they are more than good enough for anything till (and including) 2000-2001, which is marking the end of W9x era for most people, anyways. For W9x, this alone makes them very good alternatives to "real" GF4s, of which only advantage over "fake" GF4s mostly, is being even more overkill as a W9x GPU. 🤣

I know GF4 Ti and GF2 is "cooler", and yes I have one in my W9x build, but before that I was using an MX 440 and there was nothing I was lacking with it compared to a GF2 Ultra that I have now, or a Ti4200 and Ti 4600 that I also tried in the same machine.

Tbh, I've actually used a GF2MX to my satisfaction once or twice! 😁

Passive cooling, very low power requirement, why swap it for a TNT2 Ultra?

I do admit it was probably a 2MX-400, but I think even the GF2MX-200 isn't a worthless card in itself (but frankly I wouldn't pay like €5 for an untested card or something). I got a couple cheap from buying second hand rigs and by buying some very nice stuff, then searching what else same seller had for sale and then asked the seller to include the crappy stuff for hardly anything extra 😁
He got rid of his crap (all in a single package) and in return received nice good feedback and I got extra stuff for basically nothing and virtually no extra effort whatsoever 😁

The MX200 isn't terrible I used it back in the day with a Pentium III 733, a PCI version of it. It did alright with games like Elite Force, Half Life, and Quake II

Tetrium wrote:

I do admit it was probably a 2MX-400, but I think even the GF2MX-200 isn't a worthless card in itself (but frankly I wouldn't pay like €5 for an untested card or something).

In my tests, and with a reasonable fast CPU, there is a massive difference between the 200 and 400. The 200 has ~ half the memory bandwidth and that shows in the results, the 400 is almost twice as fast. A 400 can pump out ~ 100 fps in Expendable, GLQuake or Quake II at 1024 x 768.

In general you REALLY want to avoid anything with 64 bit memory interface and / or SDR memory. That's what kills performance. So for starters avoid any Loser Editions or Sucks Edition cards.

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

Tetrium wrote:

I do admit it was probably a 2MX-400, but I think even the GF2MX-200 isn't a worthless card in itself (but frankly I wouldn't pay like €5 for an untested card or something).

In my tests, and with a reasonable fast CPU, there is a massive difference between the 200 and 400. The 200 has ~ half the memory bandwidth and that shows in the results, the 400 is almost twice as fast. A 400 can pump out ~ 100 fps in Expendable, GLQuake or Quake II at 1024 x 768.

In general you REALLY want to avoid anything with 64 bit memory interface and / or SDR memory. That's what kills performance. So for starters avoid any Loser Editions or Sucks Edition cards.

Very true. I wouldn't try to search for one since there are so many better alternatives to choose from. But still it's performance is probably kinda similar to something like TNT2. Not really fantastic but I'd rather use 2MX 200 instead of something like i740 😜

It's really underestimated...kinda 🤣

I think I'll go take a look which 2MX graphics card I was actually using in that rig of mine...

Tetrium wrote:

But still it's performance is probably kinda similar to something like TNT2.

Bullseye, in my tests it's almost a perfect substitute, trading blows with the TNT2 Pro!

Tetrium wrote:

Tbh, I've actually used a GF2MX to my satisfaction once or twice! :D […]
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tayyare wrote:

Yeah, we know... Just like 640KB was the largest memory that anyone would have required for the next century, eh? 🤣

To say the truth, GF4 MX440 is from 2002 and they are more than good enough for anything till (and including) 2000-2001, which is marking the end of W9x era for most people, anyways. For W9x, this alone makes them very good alternatives to "real" GF4s, of which only advantage over "fake" GF4s mostly, is being even more overkill as a W9x GPU. 🤣

I know GF4 Ti and GF2 is "cooler", and yes I have one in my W9x build, but before that I was using an MX 440 and there was nothing I was lacking with it compared to a GF2 Ultra that I have now, or a Ti4200 and Ti 4600 that I also tried in the same machine.

Tbh, I've actually used a GF2MX to my satisfaction once or twice! 😁

Passive cooling, very low power requirement, why swap it for a TNT2 Ultra?

I do admit it was probably a 2MX-400, but I think even the GF2MX-200 isn't a worthless card in itself (but frankly I wouldn't pay like €5 for an untested card or something). I got a couple cheap from buying second hand rigs and by buying some very nice stuff, then searching what else same seller had for sale and then asked the seller to include the crappy stuff for hardly anything extra 😁
He got rid of his crap (all in a single package) and in return received nice good feedback and I got extra stuff for basically nothing and virtually no extra effort whatsoever 😁

I consider TNT class display cards (including GF2 MX) more of a S7 type of hardware, and I consider a S7 machine more of a DOS type rig (1994-1997) than W9x. When it comes to W9x (1997-2001) my preference is a PIII Coppermine at least (Tualatin is my choice), and GF2/GF4/GF4 MX class display cards. The best kill is overkill. 🤣 I had enough of the cobbled together cheap parts in my youth already.

tayyare wrote:

Tetrium wrote:

Tbh, I've actually used a GF2MX to my satisfaction once or twice! :D […]
Show full quote

tayyare wrote:

Yeah, we know... Just like 640KB was the largest memory that anyone would have required for the next century, eh? 🤣

To say the truth, GF4 MX440 is from 2002 and they are more than good enough for anything till (and including) 2000-2001, which is marking the end of W9x era for most people, anyways. For W9x, this alone makes them very good alternatives to "real" GF4s, of which only advantage over "fake" GF4s mostly, is being even more overkill as a W9x GPU. 🤣

I know GF4 Ti and GF2 is "cooler", and yes I have one in my W9x build, but before that I was using an MX 440 and there was nothing I was lacking with it compared to a GF2 Ultra that I have now, or a Ti4200 and Ti 4600 that I also tried in the same machine.

Tbh, I've actually used a GF2MX to my satisfaction once or twice! 😁

Passive cooling, very low power requirement, why swap it for a TNT2 Ultra?

I do admit it was probably a 2MX-400, but I think even the GF2MX-200 isn't a worthless card in itself (but frankly I wouldn't pay like €5 for an untested card or something). I got a couple cheap from buying second hand rigs and by buying some very nice stuff, then searching what else same seller had for sale and then asked the seller to include the crappy stuff for hardly anything extra 😁
He got rid of his crap (all in a single package) and in return received nice good feedback and I got extra stuff for basically nothing and virtually no extra effort whatsoever 😁

I consider TNT class display cards (including GF2 MX) more of a S7 type of hardware, and I consider a S7 machine more of a DOS type rig (1994-1997) than W9x. When it comes to W9x (1997-2001) my preference is a PIII Coppermine at least (Tualatin is my choice), and GF2/GF4/GF4 MX class display cards. The best kill is overkill. 🤣 I had enough of the cobbled together cheap parts in my youth already.

I tend to mostly match CPU and graphics card by performance and tweak my picks if I have some specific reason to do so (like prefer one graphics card over another due to matching colors or matching brands of that graphics card with the motherboard or due to PSU restrictions or whatever), but it comes down to personal preference.

I though there was some thread about how different Vogoners preferred to match their graphics card and CPU differently. Some may prefer to be able to play games in crazy resolutions and thus use a graphics card thats relatively powerful when compared to the rest of the system while others prefer to max the rest of the system and pick the slowest graphics card so the graphics card gets some heavy use.

I do like to cobble things together. One gains experience that way as what I've learned is that very often there's at least one unexpected problem blocking your path to glory...err I mean withholding the completion of your rig 😁

To me I tend to match CPU and GPU a bit like this (I'm skipping DOS as I think that's a different category and varies a LOT)
P1 233MMX + Virge + Voodoo 1
K6-2/333 + (some 8MB graphics card)
K6-III/400 or Celeron 400 + TNT2 M64 16MB + 1xVoodoo2 or Voodoo 3 2000
Pentium 3 600MHz/Celeron 800 + TNT2 (pro or ultra) or maybe GF2MX-200 + Voodoo SLI or just a single Voodoo 3 3000
Pentium 3 1000 + GF4MX or GF2 or maybe Voodoo 4 (if you can find one)
Pentium 3 1400MHz (Tualatin S) + GF3 or Voodoo 5 or so
Athlon XP 2000+ + GF4
Athlon XP 2500+ or P4 Northwood that's below 3000MHz + maybe FX5900
Athlon XP 3200+ (Barton) or 2.2GHz A64 or s478 Northwood of, say, 2.8GHz or faster + GF6800 or GF7600

and things get different again when it comes to PCI-E. As you can see, I've not mentioned any of the really high-end AGP cards, even though I have used em (I really loved my AGP 4670 1GB and it will only leave my presence with my bloody hand still attached to it 🤣)

And like I already mentioned, it comes down a lot to things that end up not being part of an ideal situation (unless you got too much money to burn and most probably don't) and maybe also about not being too perfectionistic 😜

Tetrium wrote:

MrMateczko wrote:

I did overclock my MX440, but I glued an 80mm fan to the heatsink. When I removed it, it got pretty hot, and the performance gai […]
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I did overclock my MX440, but I glued an 80mm fan to the heatsink.
When I removed it, it got pretty hot, and the performance gain is...worthless.
I would throw the MX440 to the garbage, and get the Ti4200. Same drivers, over triple the performance boost!
Remember that the MX440 is the today's equivalent to the GeForce 210, GT 710 and other worthless GPUs.

Oh, and use 45.23 as others said.

MX440 is far from worthless. Everything has its own niche.

If somethings value is determined only by its performance, then all retro parts should've been worthless.

I'll second that emotion - the MX440 PCI was one of my favorite go-to cards back in the 2000's when I was doing a lot more modern gaming. I used to be able to buy those for $50.00 at Wal-Mart brand new back then. The 440 was the last one I had because I wanted to upgrade to 128MB of VRAM from 64MB.

I used an MX440 in this when it was a 667 and later 1GHz Pentium III system - the Ol' GEM had quite a crazy life having been a PC of every generation from 386 to PIII skipping only the PII generation. Granted this photo was doctored a tad to show what it was to turn into when I was planning to upgrade it into a Core 2 era system before the backplane completely collapsed from too much modification work being done to it over the course of almost 10 years to that point. At some point, if I have the time, money, and want to waste some hours here and there in metal fabrication and plastic fab, I might actually try to replicate this case.

tayyare wrote:

pe rig (1994-1997) than W9x. When it comes to W9x (1997-2001) my preference is a PIII Coppermine at least (Tualatin is my choice), and GF2/GF4/GF4 MX class display cards. The best kill is overkill. 🤣 I had enough of the cobbled together cheap parts in my youth already.

That's it 🤣

What did you mean when you say "fake" mx440 cards? Please elaborate.

dosquest wrote:

What did you mean when you say "fake" mx440 cards? Please elaborate.

If you are talking about this:

tayyare wrote:

MrMateczko wrote:

To say the truth, GF4 MX440 is from 2002 and they are more than good enough for anything till (and including) 2000-2001, which is marking the end of W9x era for most people, anyways. For W9x, this alone makes them very good alternatives to "real" GF4s, of which only advantage over "fake" GF4s mostly, is being even more overkill as a W9x GPU. 🤣

I think that "fake" is refering to GeForce 4 MX.
This GeForce's series in reality was only a more powerful GeForce 2 Ti/ultra. They doesn't have programmable pixel shaders and only limited support for vertex shaders. That's definitely a step back from the programmable nature of the GeForce3 core.

Does it make them a bad card?

dosquest wrote:

Does it make them a bad card?

At the moment, in our days, it's a good choice because GeForce 440/460 ( avoid 420 or 440 64 bit variants ) are a little bit faster than GeForce 2 TI/Ultra. They are more common and cheap. But there is no point thinking that the GeForce 4 MX cards will compare to any of the GeForce 3/4TI cards because its not meant to, it was made to replace the GeForce 2 MX400 and that it does well. ( like i wrote, they lack PS programmable)
You have to think that this series was released during 2002, at the time wasn't a good deal...
They costed too much from 100€ (420) to 200€ (440 bga/460) so middle and low class and offer nothing more than a good DX7 performance. Nvidia for marketing purpose called them GeForce 4 MX, but was better GeForce 3 MX instead... At the same price ATI offered the Radeon 9000! In my opinion much better!

I've been using the 81.98 drivers on my 9x machines for my whole life now, and they seem to fit the bill for an average user.

for 2000 and XP: the 93.71 drivers seem to be the best for Geforce 2-6 cards and I can attest that they'll work fine on an MX440 because I have one that works perfectly with them.

Some driver versions can be better than others for specific games and applications, so your experience may vary.

I remember back a long time ago shopping on eBay for an inexpensive video card to play games decently on a P3 machine. I was considering Geforce4 MX cards, but noticed that they kept selling for higher prices than Geforce3 cards. So naturally I bought a Geforce 3 and let the other silly people bid up the 4MXs.

Stermy57 wrote:

They doesn't have programmable pixel shaders and only limited support for vertex shaders. That's definitely a step back from the programmable nature of the GeForce3 core.

I'm not a graphics guy and I'm not clear on the difference between "pixel shaders" and "vertex shaders". But I do remember seeing mention somewhere that for a while, some versions of the nVidia drivers enabled software assisted support for such tomfoolery on the 4MX cards. If true, then maybe it would work for early shader'ish (Geforce 3 era) games like Morrowind and whatever else. I've never tried it, but the notion that some drivers might enable this on the 4MX cards intrigued me.

shamino wrote:

I remember back a long time ago shopping on eBay for an inexpensive video card to play games decently on a P3 machine. I was considering Geforce4 MX cards, but noticed that they kept selling for higher prices than Geforce3 cards. So naturally I bought a Geforce 3 and let the other silly people bid up the 4MXs.

Maybe I'm looking at it the wrong way, but I remember some time ago many sellers were selling the MX4 cards for more, due to them having a larger amount of memory compared to the usual GF2 cards (same goes for GF3, to a lesser extent). It was actually a good time to buy Voodoo3, so I did! 😁

But it was basically more sensible to buy the cheaper and faster older high-end cards then to buy the newer slower budget cards, even though these had more graphics memory.

I love this card. I use it for Windows 98 SE DirectX 7.0 system, which I am building a new one. I stick to the 45.23 drivers and a sure fire way to get a non-gimped/high quality GeForce4 MX-440 is to instead buy a Quadro4 380XGL video card. It only comes one way, AGP 8x, 128-bit memory bus and high quality.

Sorry to revive the post, but i think most of you are right with your own experiences, as GF4 MX can be cr*p, or very good cards. I am in to purchase a good GF4 MX card, and i realize there are MX440's with 32, 64, and 128-bit buses, with SDR or DDR memory, and with 64 or 128 MB ram. There also different clocked MX460 ranging from 270/300 to 300/550, and i have seen some with 64-bit bus.

I am sure most people saying the GF4MX's are crap are right just because they had a bad GF4MX card and had to tune down the resolution and graphics detail in games, and people saying they are great, are also right, because a good GF4 MX440 or MX460 obliterates a Geforce 2 GTS or Ultra, and are even faster in most games of that era than a GeForce 3 Ti 200 and mostly on par with a Ti 500, but completely silent, passive cooled, more efficient, and with less power consumption. They also come sometimes in "Low profile" format what is a very valuable feature for slim retro gaming PC's

Finding a great GF4MX is a bit hard because of the flood of the bad ones, but once you have one, the GF4 MX is the best card for Windows 98 gaming for compatibility/performance while being about period correct and not going overkill needing bigger PSUs and incurring in some compatibility issues with older games..

I was lucky enough to find out that the GF4 MX440 I got incidentally is not only PCI, but also has 64 MB 128-bit DDR RAM. Great card for my newly built Windows ME machine. 😀

yeah the "mx440" can be something that will struggle against a Geforce 2 MX or something that will beat the Geforce 2 Ultra depending on the configuration of the card,

back in 2002 most of them were initially fairly decent, with the "SE" models being the slower ones, but very quickly it became a mess with all sorts of different clocks and memory configurations simply being sold as MX440

the GF4 MX is the best card for Windows 98 gaming for compatibility/performance

Not in the slightest. The best all-around cards are still GeForce 2 series. Just by the fact that they have access to almost all early Detonator drivers, which is a huge boon for slow CPU configs and compatibility options.
With GeForce 4 MX, you're limited to Detonator 27.xx or newer driver.