Keith Devens .com

Do not get the GeForce4 MX series. It's an interesting little scam they have going on... NVidia has two main chipsets in the GF4 line... the MX and Ti series. The Ti (Titanium) series is the high end branch of cards, and all are good performers. However, before they went forward with the Ti Line they wanted to cash in, so they released the GF4 MX series, of which the card you mention above is a member. This line, in crude terms, sucks. It's not really a new chipset, the GF4 MX series is the GF3 chipset with a brute force support rendering chip from the GF2 line. The card is not even fully DX8 compliant (nevermind we have DX9 out now) due to this, and NVidia covered it up.

The bottom line in real world terms is that the GF4MX card you mention above has a higher maximum potential throughput than the comparable Radeon, but it's wildly inconsistent and spotty in terms of performance. Due to the mixing of rendering chipsets, the image quality suffers as well, especially in 2D windows applications. NVidia really dropped the ball with the release of the GeForce 4 MX line, and they are pretty much universally panned in the gaming enthusiast market.

ATi's Radeon line, on the other hand, is remarkably consistent, and thanks to ATi stepping up their driver support with the Catalyst drivers (you should go download the latest Catalyst drivers right away), they have great D3D support, pretty good OpenGL support, and crisp 2D image quality. The top of the line Radeon cards kick the crap out of the top of the line NVidia offerings right now too, but you aren't working with the high end, so I won't delve into that here.

I have two computers here, one with a GeForce card and one with a Radeon card, and there is a distinctly visible difference in image sharpness in 2D. I can't fairly compare them in 3D, however, since I have the latest generation of Radeon, and my GeForce card is old, but you get the idea.

Honestly, for the money you spent, I think the Radeon was probably the way to go. In terms of bang-for-the-buck ratio though, the best option would either be the GeForce4 Ti 4200 (not the card you mention above, the one I mention here is from the titanium line) for about $100ish or the Radeon 9500 Pro for about $170... either one of those would have the best turnover in terms of performance vs. price.

Of course, I gather you didn't even want to spend that on a video card, but I figure I should throw it out there in case anyone else was looking for a video card and didn't want to break the bank.

I would also like to note that if you want to make a strong increase in gaming performance, aside from upgrading the CPU/Mobo, you might want to boost the amount of RAM in your machine to 512 MB or more. That will make a noticeable difference in just about everything, and RAM is also really freakin' cheap nowadays.

Of course, if your mobo doesn't support DDR RAM you won't get as much of a performance increase, but increasing your RAM will still help regardless.