What's the thing about MX vs FX cards?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Doc
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Doc

I sense that GeForce MX series cards are considered a poor cousin to the FX
cards, why is this?
 
Doc said:
I sense that GeForce MX series cards are considered a poor cousin to the FX
cards, why is this?
Click to expand...

When the FX line was new, there were many posts here from people complaining
about reduced benchmarks and framerates when they "upgraded" from their GF
MX440 to a FX5200. There are several Geforce4 MX cards that routinely
outperform many of the lower end FX series. Some are worse overall. Of
course, the Geforce2MX cards are quite outdated, DX7 only and slower cores
and only 2 pipes and 64bit memory. The GF4 MX 440 can be had in AGP8X, a
decent performer, with 128bit memory and 275Mhz core / 250 DDR memory , but
limited to DX8.1. It'll outperform an FX5200, and hold it's own against a
straight FX5600. The "bad" GF4 MX's are the MX420 with slow SDRAM and the
MX440SE with 64bit memory.
 
And I should point out that would be better off posted in
alt.comp.periphs.videocards.nvidia
 
The GF4 MX 440 can be had in AGP8X, a
decent performer, with 128bit memory and 275Mhz core / 250 DDR memory ,
but limited to DX8.1.
Click to expand...

Made a mistake here..the GF4 MX440 is DX7, not DX8.1 but the rest is
correct.
 
But there is a major point that you alluded to but didn't make. Since the
MX cards don't have to process higher DX commands, they can perform better.
I guarentee if you limited a fx5200 to a DX 7 game, a more level field, it
would get much closer to the cpu limit than an MX.

Doc, you sound a little newbish. The MX was out far before the FX series,
and can't possibly compare in features or speed. I always like to think of
the MX 400 series as a Geforce 2.5, it just doesn't have the features of
higher quality cards.

Also, Augustus is correct that this should be posted in the nvidia domain.
 
Both
Click to expand...

You're thinking of ATI (which brings us back to the topic of this
group).

Even though nVidia probably has the capability to make video cards,
beyond the reference prototypes, they don't actually manufacture any.
That's left to other companies. nVidia (hard to decide whether to
capitalize it here) is a GPU chip maker/designer. ATI is the one that
manufactures boards as well as designing and manufacturing GPUs.

There are some Chinese and Taiwanese generic boards out there that say
nothing more than "nVidia" for the manufacturer, but these aren't made
by nVidia. The boards are a near perfect clone of the reference
prototypes, but beyond the GPU, and maybe the stock reference cooler,
they weren't manufactured by nVidia.
 
There are some Chinese and Taiwanese generic boards out there that say
nothing more than "nVidia" for the manufacturer, but these aren't made
by nVidia. The boards are a near perfect clone of the reference
prototypes, but beyond the GPU, and maybe the stock reference cooler,
they weren't manufactured by nVidia.
Click to expand...

I stand corrected. You're right, they just make the GPU's and not the video
card.
 
Philburg said:
But there is a major point that you alluded to but didn't make. Since the
MX cards don't have to process higher DX commands, they can perform
better. I guarentee if you limited a fx5200 to a DX 7 game, a more level
field, it would get much closer to the cpu limit than an MX.
Click to expand...

Near as I can tell, the fx5200 pretty much held it's own compared to any of
the MX series - at least based on tom's hardware charts.

It's kind of like a battle to be the least shittiest of nvidia cards.
Neither will really run recent games, though, so it's a moot point.

Tom
 
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