Hercules 3D Prophet II MX 400, AGP

Rating:
Summary: solid and reliable
Review: Bought it 1 year ago, have been very happy, no problems, drivers always up to date on Hercules website. Nvidia drivers work just as well, you can choose either.

Rating:
Summary: A low-cost, good-performing GeForce card
Review: The 3D Prophet II MX 400 is an excellent card for budget-minded gamers who still want good performance and features for their games. I have a Pentium III 600MHz 128MB AGP 2.0 Win98 PC, and with the MX 400 I am able to get good frame rates at resolutions up to 1024x768, and in some games, such as older ones like Descent 3 and Half-Life, I can even get good frame rates at up to 1280x1024. After benchmarking the MX and my old Voodoo3 PCI card, I can safely say the MX 400 is twice as fast. The MX 400 has great Direct3D and OpenGL support, and I have no problem whatsoever playing recent games like Black & White and older ones like Quake (one of the first OpenGL games). Also, since GeForce cards are so popular, one can count on it to have the greatest compatibility with games and longevity in future driver support. The card supports 3D anti-aliasing (commonly called full-scene anti-aliasing or FSAA) for Direct3D and OpenGL, but use it judiciously. This feature is enabled in display properties by default. And it could severely reduce your frame rates. And its effectiveness differs from game to game. In Deus Ex, even with FSAA set at 4x, I still see jagged edges everywhere, and I lose about 20 fps of frame rate! In older games like Half-Life and Quake, the result is better, but I can still notice the jaggedness here and there, even with 4x FSAA, especially while looking at objects at a far distance. Hence, my advice is turn FSAA off, and try to run your games at a higher resolution instead.
This card has its own heat sink and fan, and uses nVidia's GeForce2 MX 400 chipset, a slight architectural difference from its earlier GeForce2 MX chip. The HotHardware web site has a benchmark comparison of the MX and the MX 400, and it shows negligible difference in speed between the two. In fact, the box of the Hercules MX 400 still displays the "MX" title, with a barely noticeable "MX 400" printed above it. On Hercules' web site, the MX 400 and the MX are both priced the same. Therefore, if you already have the MX, keep it; if you're buying the MX 400, do not pay more than the MX for it. The included CD has an outdated display driver for the card, and only DirectX 7.0, not the latest 8.0a. The latest driver version as I speak is 12.41, which can be downloaded from Hercules' or nVidia's web site. The driver does not let you adjust colors and gamma for Direct3D and OpenGL. But there is program called 3Deep on the Hercules CD which lets you calibrate your monitor for 3D modes. (I had to manually delete all registry references of 3Deep from a previous installation before I could install 3Deep again.) The display driver also provides color, hue, brightness, and contrast controls for overlay display, and that should be very useful for DVD playbacks. One annoyance is they interfere with the color and brightness controls in my software DVD player. Every time I start a playback, I have to go into display properties and change the overlay settings in order to override the settings in my software DVD player. With my old Voodoo3 card, the DVD picture was pixellated and full of color banding; but with the MX 400, it looks terrific, even with hardware motion compensation turned off.