Nvidia's GeForce chips are the talk of the town these days thanks to their performance, but hushed whispers in the background somewhere also speak of their somewhat outrageous prices. Well, maybe that's a bit strong but they're hardly a wallet-friendly range...

Until now, that is. This card is based around a Geforce 2 MX processor, which is basically a cut down version of the Geforce 2. It runs at a slightly slower clock speed (175MHz instead of 200MHz) and it only has two rendering pipelines as opposed to the four that the real deal sports. The Prophet II MX is outfitted with 32MB of RAM, although it's only SDR (single data rate) rather than the faster DDR (go on, guess...).

The fairly small card itself comes with no extra trimmings, with just a plain monitor output and no other features, and the bundle consists of the driver disk and a few games demos. Of course, to get the price of a GeForce powered card down to near a hundred quid, a lot of sacrifices are going to have to be made. So how does this MX chip actually perform?

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The good news is, pretty impressively, but with a catch. It produced a very good score under 3DMark 2000, plus the Quake 3 frame rates actually edged out the Radeon, of all things! But, and it's a big but, this was only true at the lower resolutions. Crank it up to 1024 x 768 (or, God help you, beyond that) and put the high quality details on, and the frame rate drops drastically.

Price-wise though, this is a great card. It has a good 3D graphics feature set (including T&L support), and as long as you don't push it too hard it's a great budget solution.