Benchmarks So, all of that is great, but what type of performance can you expect from this little wonder? NVIDIA was kind enough to furnish me with a reference board, and I put the GeForce2 MX against it's siblings, the GeForce 32MB DDR and the GeForce2 GTS 32MB. How does this card fare, considering it is a fraction of the price of either of these Beasts? Lets see. Test System ABIT BE6 Pentium 3 Coppermine 550MHz @ 682MHz 128MB PC133 RAM Maxtor 20GB 7200RPM HD GeForce2 MX 32MB Reference board GeForce2 GTS 32MB Reference board Detonator Driver 5.30 SB Live! Value Samsung 950P 19" Monitor @ 85Hz Windows 98SE DirectX 7.0 Quake3 Next we ran it through it's paces in everyone's favorite OpenGL based game, Quake3. All tests were done with all options at default, sound off, using the High Quality Settings, including Trilinear Filtering. Demo001 was used in all tests.   The GeForce2 MX puts in a great showing in the 16bit tests, despite the unusual 640x480 results, which I ran ten times to make sure they were correct, it eclipses the SDR GeForce all across the board. Framerates are playable all the way up to 1280x1024x16. At 32bit the results are a lot closer, with the MX and SDR swapping the lead. While not stellar, it is still playable at 1024x768x32. 3DMark 2000 For our DirectX tests, we used the old standby, 3DMark 2000, from the folks over at MadOnion. Below are the results. The tests were taken at 1024x768 resolution, with both 16 and 32bit color and texture depth. All other settings were at default. Unlike the Quake3 tests, in Direct3D, the more advanced core of the GF2 MX really shows it's stuff. Despite being clocked higher, the SDR board is overtaken by the MX, at half the price. TreeMark To compare the Transform & Lighting engine of the GeForce2 MX against the other NVIDIA cards, we used NVIDIA's own TreeMark, which you can download here. We ran both the Simple and Complex tests. Here everything performs exactly as I suspected the second generation T&L unit on the MX allows it to pull ahead of both the SDR and DDR GeForce cards. The higher clocked GeForce2 GTS spanks them all. Conclusion The GeForce2 MX is an absolute godsend for the the gamer looking to upgrade his or her system without breaking the bank. While it's not going to blow away any of the top-end cards with it's speed, I would bet you can't find a $120 card that will beat it. The cards should be available sometime in July from all of the major vendors, ie. Creative Labs, Guillemot, Elsa, etc. You get better performance than a GeForce SDR, at a third of the price. Combine that with features like T&L and per pixel shading, you also get support for cutting edge features that are beginning to show up in the best games. Competitors will be hard pressed to give this type of cost vs. performance ratio. The GeForce2 MX delivers the best bang for the buck that I have ever seen in a video card, and for that reason, it becomes the first graphics card to receive 3DGPU's Editor's Choice Award. Brian Evans Editor-in-Chief Comment on this Review in the Discussion Forums or email me at brian@3dgpu.com     Copyright © 1999 Gamer's Alliance Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part in any form or medium without express written permission of Gamer's Alliance Inc. is prohibited.