Hot 3D Graphics at a Cool Price

One of the easiest ways you can improve your 3D gaming experience is to plug the latest graphics board into your system. But with prices of the latest gaming boards topping $300 and more, such an upgrade can be very expensive.

Enter NVidia's budget-minded GeForce2 MX chip--the heart of Guillemot's impressive 32MB Hercules 3D Prophet II MX. The 3D Prophet II MX uses a trimmed-down version of the GeForce2 GTS architecture, and costs a mere $149. Like the GeForce2 GTS, the GeForce2 MX chip incorporates per-pixel shading and second-generation hardware transform-and-lighting capabilities, which respectively sharpen and speed up your graphics display.

The MX chip cuts costs by reducing clock speeds, trimming the memory bandwidth by almost half to 2.7 gigabits per second, and using Single Data Rate SDRAM instead of faster, pricier Double Data Rate memory. Specifically, the MX has a core clock speed of 175 MHz, as opposed to 200 MHz for the GTS, and a memory clock speed of 183 MHz, in contrast to the GTS's 333 MHz.

As a result, the MX's fill rate drops to 700 million texels per second, from the 1.6 million texels per second of the full-blown GTS chip. (Just as a pixel is the smallest unit of a 2D object, a texel--a texture element or textured pixel--is the smallest unit of a 3D object.)

But even with those trims, you get a blazingly fast card in the 3D Prophet II MX, at a list price half that of the $299 32MB Hercules 3D Prophet II GTS. Like its powerful sibling, the 3D Prophet II MX requires a system with an AGP slot--no PCI version is available. The 3D Prophet II MX supports up to 4X AGP.