GF2MX = VFM 4 Sure! (Creative 3D Blaster GeForce2 MX)

Member Name: Welshlad

Product:	Creative 3D Blaster GeForce2 MX
Date:	03/04/01 (1360 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Great performance

Disadvantages: ?

There are graphics cards, and then there is the GeForce range of cards, which is generally regarded a cut above the rest, and in my opinion, rightly so. Originally, the new GeForce 2 cards cost the best part of £500 and were out of most peoples price range, but since the release of the superb Geforce2 MX cards available from a range of manufacturers, this has changed the market completely, and brought high performance gaming to an affordable level so that its not only the ‘rich kids’ that can buy a card that would suit any spec PC.
Costing anything between £75-£150, this card is serious value for money, and there is enough flexibility on the MX range to suite most needs, with 32Mb and 64Mb version coming in SDR and DDR flavours depending on your needs, obviously though, this is reflected in the price range.

One of the hottest cards about (outperformed by the new GeForce 2 GTS and Ultra cards, although seriously better value for money too in my opinion) there cards are largely hard to fault. Its main rival in the form of 3dFX have just gone bust and been acquired by nVidia, the makers of the GeForce cards, while its other rivals ATI cards in the form of the Radeon series currently have very shoddy drivers and are no the best supported devices in the world, unlike the nVidia cards, that get continuous support and new device drivers all the time.

Being a card of this type of value, there are little extra ‘freebies’ that you get with some of the high end cards, such as free games etc, but if you really wanted those games, you could easily buy them with the money you will save when buying one of these cards.

Running at a core speed of 175Mhz, this cards is also incredibly easy to ‘overclock’ and squeeze some extra performance. By simply adding a registry hack (very simple to do, did it myself in a matter of 30 seconds) or by downloading a registry patch, you will get an over clocking slider added to the
device properties in windows, and you8 can increase the running speed of the core clock of the card to in excess of 200Mhz, without any extra cooling or other adverse effects. Again, you can take it further than this, but some extra cooling would be STRONGLY advise din this instance. Further to this, you can also up the speed the onboard memory runs at, to gain some extra performance, its really an issue of trial-and-error in order to see what is the best your system will allow you to run at.
One thing to point out though, is that overclocking could well invalidate your warranty on the card, and is not something that is done without a little risk, so I’d advise anyone thinking of doing so to do a little at a time and take great care in doing so.

Happily running all your most graphically resource draining games at full screen with resolutions in excess of 1024X768 with no slow down at all, this card is serious gaming performance on a top chip indeed.

In terms of buying advice, I would advise anyone to hang on a little. The GeForce 3 will soon be released (costing something ridiculous initially like £500) and will no doubt cause the price of this (and other) cards to plummet again, so if you can hang on, maybe it would be better to wait until that time and buy then.

With all things considered, this is a pretty hard card to fault. Great performance at a very good price which is really hard to beat. Just wait a little.

Summary: