The MX chip, a low cost version of the GeForce 2, has allowed NVIDIA to elbow its way into a market segment that is at once very new and very important to the company - the cost-conscious OEM market. Until now, ATi was the undisputed ruler of all things OEM, but this has changed now. There are several reasons for this development. Technically, it would be closer to the truth if the MX was called GeForce 1,5, since, like the original GeForce 256, it has only 2 renderpipelines. (The internal name for the MX is actually NV11, while the GeForce 256 is called NV10 and the GeForce 2 is the NV15). Besides, it is clocked lower, running at 175MHz instead of the GF2's 200MHz.

The biggest design differences between the two cards is to be found in the memory, though. The "big" GeForce 2 GTS cards are exlusively built around a 128bit DDR memory interface, giving them exactly what modern games need when you play in 32bit color at 800x600 or above - memory bandwidth, and lots of it. In contrast, most games don't even come close to stressing the renderpipelines to their limits, since they are written for compatibilty with older video cards. After all, the publishers want to sell their product to as large an audience as possible...right?

More than likely, most of the GeForce 2 MX cards that you will see on store shelves will be sing standard single data rate (SDR) SDRAM using a 128bit memory bus. Running at 166MHz (the memory speed specified by NVIDIA), this provides a theoretical memory throughput of 2,65GB/s. Hercules is selling its retail MX card (not bulk or OEM!!) with faster memory running at 183MHz, resulting in 2,93 GB/s. Meanwhile, a standard GeForce 2 GTS uses memory clocked at 333MHz (128bit DDR) and achieves a theoretical maximum memory throughput of 5,3GB/s, while the Ultra reaches a whopping 7,36 GB/s. Basically, you could conclude that the GeForce 2 brand is based more on marketing value for the MX than on the technology really inside the chip. Obviously this strategy is working out well, as is borne out by the MX's sales history.

Now here's some food for thought: the GeForce 2 GTS's predecessor, the GeForce 256 DDR, is only marginally more expensive than an MX but offers a memory bandwidth of 4,8 GB/s (300MHz DDR). Although the slower chip speed of only 125MHz and the fewer renderpipelins (only two instead of the GF2's four) do take their toll on the card's performance, it is definitely worth a look if you're in the market for an MX class board.