You can see at a glance that this board is not meant for the hardware enthusiast. Creative even skimped on chipcooling, not even including the standard heatsink. So I guess I shouldn't have been surprised that measurements taken during a Quake 3 benchmark loop showed the chips surface to reach 70°C!!! Despite this thermal strain, I experienced no crashes or optical glitches during testing. Nonetheless, this is the wrong place to cut corners - this kind of temperature just can't be healthy for any chip! Aside from that I couldn't make out any deviations from the NVIDIA' reference board layout.

The card itself is manufactured in Singapur and is of impeccable production quality. It supports AGP 4x and will fit into any universal AGP slot. The SDRAM chips are rated at 7ns, which should be more than sufficient for 143MHz. Overclokers are likely to frown upon this choice, however, as it leaves little headroom for, uh, "tweaking". Then again, that's not really the target audience this board is aimed at,anyway. More likely, it's meant for the system integrator that needs to save costs wherever he can. Since the Creative GeForce 2 MX is one of the few cards available for under DM 300 (on the street), it seems to fit this bill nicely. But is saving the DM 30-50 that a 128bit SDRAM MX would cost really such a good investment? Before we let the benchmarks tell the tale, let me give you an impression of the card's software bundle.

Owners of a Soundblaster Live will feel right at home in the driver menus, that have Creative's trademark look-and-feel. If you've never seen these menus before, you might need a bit of time before you feel comfortable navigating your way through the many options , but once you've understood the structure, you'll be quite pleased by the comfort and extensive settings these drivers offer.