Question about this card?

I was thinking of purchasing this card for an older PC I have. Does any one currently run this card and if so i would like yer take on it thanks.

BFG 3DFuzion GeForce MX 4000 128MB DDR PCI Graphics Card

I wouldln't hit a hog in the ass with it. The card most likely won't run SL or if it does, just barely. A GF TI 4200 is an infinitly better card. The 5500 is actually a pretty good choice and they can still be found cheap online.

Brick and morter retailers want way too much for these older cards, the MX 4000 especially. Its a $10 bargain bin card yet Wal Mart wants $60 or so for it. You can find 5500's for around $50 online but retailers are wanting $125. For that you can find 6600's online which are fast, modern cards.

avoid anything starting with > GeForce MX > they are light versions and usually horrible for games, kinda like Celeron.

aye, avoid MX cards

ok so avoid GF and MX so what is there left? LOL

(Geforce mx) was a budget model

are you upgrading your vid card for SL use or just general, cause it wont really do much for SL, unless you have a intel vid card that is

Pci vid cards , hmm only one that comes to mind is gf5200 - 128/256 ram, for pci.

bah i bought it before i read this. It does run using a pentium III and 416 RAM but frame rate sucks. Is it the slow cpu or the card thats affecting the Frame Rate

SL want cpu alot more then your vid card, but with better vid card you can have shiney things on.

<.< right now SL is a hog on alot of very nice computers out there, just veeery slow rezzing, so we're waiting for another update for that.

It seemed shinny was working I Jacked up the graphics options and they all seemed to work except for the low frame rate. It doesn't look as good as my labtop but it look fairly good.

hehe ment, general, like Antialising, Fsaa, Anistropic, resolutions, shaders, pixel ect.

I agree that the MX card is a budget card but, what features are missing in it that SL actually uses that would even make the hardware worth owning? What games have you played that these features are vital to the actual game? Just because it is a budget card, that does not mean SL or any game will run like crap on it. I have an AGP Geforce 4000 MX 128MB DDR and it handles SL and Painkiller just fine. As I have stated before, just because the specs are uber cool, that is not a reason to justify the purchase. It is like saying a V8 is a powerful engine and the specs means that it will go really fast and have a lot of low-end tourque and high-end speed but that doesn't mean that it will fit into your Ford Fiesta. The video card is a good choice but I will also agree on the pricing, traditional stores want your soul for a mainboard proc combo, a good online store will only want your arm. Shop around a bit, but 1st things are 1st , make sure the video card will play nice with your computer before you buy it unless you enjoy multiple trips and/or paying restocking fees. As I will continue to state, all mainboards are made differently, all are tested differently. Each top name brand manufacturer will have tested their products for compatability with other hardware such as memory and video cards. This is called the hardware compatability list most vendors offer. If the mainboard you own does not list a particular vid card you want to buy on the HCL then you are most likely outta luck or will experience a ton of problems. Makes me wonder how many of those crashing in SL are just because of that, they have an uber cool card that isn't playing nice with their mainboard because they failed to check the HCL before buying it. Also, the old "it is an older card so my new mainboard will support it" ascertation is wrong as well. Example:
New Tyan mainboard for Dual Xeon 2.0GHz procs, boss figured an old Nvidia TNT card will work cause it is old, not. The card did work as far as posting and bootup, but in MS Word, the text was all messed up, I mean really bad. I performed a bit of research on the HCL for the mainboard, card wasn't even mentioned. Replaced it with one from the HCL and all problems went away, to boot it is an ATI Radeon 8500 128 MB ram and it also handles SL just nicely without crashing or without the openGL issues I have been reading about. Just some food for thought.

Thanks for the great reply i feel a lttle more educated on the subjet

I missed one other point that is important to consider as well.


It is also a good idea to verify in any way, shape or form that a video card manufacturer uses pure drivers. What I mean by that is, there are some vendors that use a bastardized version of the driver that they made tweaks to which in turn could cause conflicts or other issues or even worse, they could go out of business and no new drivers will ever exist for their product. Rest assured, BFG uses pure drivers from nVidia. In fact, the best thing to do when getting a BFG vid card is to go to nVidia's website and downlaod the latest geForce drivers from them and use them since the ones supplied on the CD are most likely 1 to 3 revisions out of date. A pure driver video card vendor could go out of business and you would still be able to get the latest updates for their product, unless the chip maker goes under...*shivers at that thought*

I wanted to add , this applies for ATI as well, although I haven't seen too many ATI vendors that don't use pure ATI drivers.

Wel, this may not be the vid card. A ton of users are having the same issues, even I do and my old setup handled 1.6 pretty well. I think for this, it may be best to wait till the primary issues are resolved with SL then perhaps your new vid card will show it's true potential and pay for itself. To say any pice of hardware is to blame for poor client performance at this stage is jumping the gun because it has been stated that this performace issue is even hitting those with top end computers.

Your damn right Mike. There is no way to know if its your video card right now.

FYI I run Nvidia GeForce 4 MX Graphics card and whether its a "light" version or not, I experienced lag free smooth SL until the update to 1.7.

The original post asked opinion. My opinion is the card sucks greatly. It is a GF2 card repackaged with more memory. Looking online I was able to find them around $40. At the same time I was able to find an Nvidia 5500 by PNY for the same exact price. The 5500 is a vastly better card and what I would really consider the minimum for good play on SL. The MX 4000 may indeed play SL just fine, I am not disputing that, but for the same money you can get a very good, modern card in the 5500 that will play most anything you throw at it. If you look around at reviews on the MX 4000 you will find lots of bad ones indicating it won't run even relatively modest video intensive games.

Mike, your logic is sound. It is so unfortunate to see people are being forced into fiddling with drivers and cards or even going for an upgrade even if we have no information about what exactly is wrong. This is perhaps due to some communication strategy adopted by LL. For e.g. I have been told very confidently, repeatedly and condescendingly by support that my Quicktime related crashes was my machine's fault (i.e. probably old driver, and my low FPS was due to my card which btw plays DOOM III, COunter Strike and Far Cry without a glitch and very smoothly. I have a GF Go 5600 Laptop and 2 Gig of RAM/and an office machine with 2 Gig RAM and GF 5600 FX, and another one with an ATI Mobility Radeon 9700 with 2 Gig RAM, can reach about 40 FPS with all graphics settings on extreme minimum but we should not need to do this, with normal setttings I average 4-5 FPS and depending on days 1-4 FPS). I was even on the point of upgrading all the video cards on all the machines of the people I have brought in SL, but now I am going to wait. It's not worth it. There is not enough information for us to decide which card is the best. Both bleeding edge Nvidia and ATI cards seems to be having unresolved issues. So my strategy is to wait for a month or two. I had to eat my own words about SL in many of my meetings with my peers. Now I am not so eager to bring them in until I find interactions in SL acceptable. I dont want to have a mini rebellion on my hands, with people on my team calling for a shift to another platform (even if the social aspects will be missing). Right now, I am on the defensive mode regarding SL with my pees. My general message to people who are contacting me to help them in SL: " SL is being so popular that it's population has grown up too rapidly. And LL is upgrading its system and I will inform them as soon as the upgrade is complete. And I promised things will be better in a week or two"
MG