Geforce2 MX400 vs Geforce2 Titanium

[Kent Pfeiffer]

I'm planning to upgrade my video card and need some advice. I've got a 450 mHz PIII with 352MB RAM and an old 16MB TNT2 video card (WinME OS). Needless to say, the hi-res terrain mods bring my computer to its knees.

I've narrowed it down to either a 64MB Geforce2 MX400 or a 64MB Geforce2 Titanium. A lot of reviewers have slammed the MX400. On the other hand, it's about $40-50 cheaper than the Titanium. The question is, given the limitations of my CPU, will the Titanium be significantly (at least 10-20%) faster than the MX400 in CM?

[Schrullenhaft]

I would say that the GeForce 2 Titanium should be about 10-20% (or possibly more) faster than the GeForce2 MX400. The differences are in the GPU/video chip's clock speed and, more importantly, the memory interface for the Titanium is DDR while the MX400's is SDR or DDR running at 64bit width (rather than 128 or 256 - can't remember exactly). This memory bandwidth difference is one of the major speed differences between many video cards.

Some people may point out that your P3-450 may be on the low-end for the graphics hardware that you're considering, but I say that it is still worth it to purchase the Titanium (which is a hair bit faster than the GeForce2 Pro, but slower than the GeForce2 Ultra).

[Doug Williams]

You have a socket 370 MB? I would be worth thinking about to upgrade that CPU also.

[Kent Pfeiffer]

Thanks Schrullenhaft.

Doug, I'm not sure what you mean by "socket 370MB". If you are referring to RAM, my computer has 3 slots for it: 2 are ocuppied the 96MB that I ordered with the computer, the third has 256MB (you can hardly go wrong for $30) that I plugged in there last month.

I am basically just trying to extend the useful life of my computer for another year or so without spending too much money. At the point the CPU really needs to be replaced, I'll probably just buy a whole new computer.

[Soddball]

Socket 370MB is a 'socket 370' motherboard. It means the type of CPU you have fitted into the motherboard. There are slot and socket - slots are the upright buggers with the plastic case.

I would recommend the dirt-cheap MX400-64MB. It's not big or powerful, but it IS cheap.

Incidentally, you may find a performance increase if you pull out the smaller capacity RAM, because it may run slower than the newer RAM.

I host Unreal Tournament games at work on a LAN and the host machine is a P3-450 with 512MB of RAM and a GEForce2-MX card.

Let us know what sort of games you're going to play, and I'll try to let you know whether you need to spend the extra - but at the moment I don't think you do need to.

[Kent Pfeiffer]

Well, I don't know much about motherboards. I looked into replacing it at one point, but quickly became so confused I dropped the whole idea. I can add RAM, and replace something like the video card or cd drive, but that's about as far as it goes. All of my RAM is PC100 SDRAM, but thanks for the advice.

For the most part, I just play wargames and turn-based stratgy games, so CM (and soon CM:BB) is the only game that really taxes my system. IL-2 Sturmovik looks interesting, but I'm doubtful my system will be able to deal with it, even with a new graphics card.

[LtCol.05]

I'va had the GeForce 3 T200 for about 2 weeks now and love it. Tested the speed on the NVidia site and it was running only 6% slower than the T500. I have a 866MHz machine, 512Meg RAM running Win 98SE.....