Jaton 3DForce 2 MX Review (Page 1 of 3)

Product sample provided by: A friend
Date posted: 6/24/01

Introduction

A year or two ago I would not have expected S3 to take such a plunge, after all, they were in my opinion about the best when it came to video card price performance ratios. Who would have guessed that the budget card niche was to be filled by the champion of high end, none other than nVidia. After the success of their legendary GeForce card they proceeded to create the GeForce 2 followed by the subject of our discussion today. The GeForce 2 MX. While this card carried the same feature set as its more powerful brethren the GeForce 2 GTS, the MX had to be starved of memory bandwidth and fill rate in order to reduce its performance. Thus it was a lower priced "value" card. The end result was a card with unmatched power for its price range. Nothing else could even come close. And so to this day nvidia has not only covered the lofty demands with their GeForce 3, but they have also succeeded in meeting the needs of everyday users, or gamers on a tight budget, and even system integrators.

A few weeks ago a good friend asked if I would like to review this Jaton GeForce 2 MX. I readily agreed and here we are. Overall I belive Jaton's goal with this card was to shoot for as low a price as possible. Thus some of the features seen on other MXs have been dropped in order to further reduce production costs. For example, it does not have TV Out, a software bundle or cooling fan. Thankfully, they did not skimp on the important stuff, namely the ram. It has been equipped with the standard 166MHz SDRAM. And while the Jaton 3DForce 2 MX is not the absolute lowest priced MX on pricewatch.com it is only 9 USD more expensive than its slower sibling the MX200 3DForce MX-32. And as you will soon see, it is a real quality piece of equipment.

Specifications

Nvidia GeForce2 MX GPU at 175MHz
32MB on-board 128bit SDRAM at 166MHz
350MHz RAMDAC.
2.8 GB/s memory bandwidth
20 million triangles/sec
Digital Vibrance control
NVIDIA Shading Rasterizer (NSR)
High-Definition Video Processor (HDVP)
AGP 4X with Fast Writes Support
32-bit color
32-bit Z/stencil buffer
Cube environment mapping
DirectX and S3 texture compression