I have a 64mb NVidia Geforce MX2. It seems to always show up as the lowest possible requirement for modern games - even the Sims 2 listed it as the lowest you could get away with.
But it runs that game fine - very clean, fluid, with no problems (it probably helps that the system it’s installed in is pretty fast and powerful).
If I want to try a few recent games like Half Life 2 and World of Warcraft, will I be able to get away using this card?
I don’t know anything about Warcraft, but from what i’ve read you’ll really have trouble trying to play HL2 with that card. You’d probably have to play it on lowest resolution, with many of the more advanced graphics features of the game disabled. And your framerate would be pretty low, i think.
The reason the GF2 MX shows up so often is because it was a disgustingly popular video card of its time. The original GeForce pretty much set in stone the current trends for video cards, and its successor was pretty huge. There’re a lot of people that still have 'em, and it’d be stupid not to pander to that customer base.
That said, we’re at the point where the GF2 is about to be gone. We’ve got DX9.0-capable cards going for the $50 price range, which is the sweet spot to appeal to casual gamers, since just about everyone can afford one…
As for running games… if the rest of your computer exceeds the recommended specs by a significant amount, say, with double the RAM, or a 3.2 ghz processor, you’d probably get by. Heck, I’ve seen screenshots of Doom 3 rendered on an old Voodoo-2… it ain’t pretty, but it’s… ahem… “possible”.
If you’re ever thinking about upgrading, nVidia’s upcoming GeForce 6200-series of graphics cards will be starting at around $79 when they’re released…
Except the Geforce 6200 is going to be PCI-E only, though I do agree they offer good performance for their price. Hopefully they will find a home in a lot of OEM boxes, making that the new standard baseline graphics card, much like the Geforce2/4MX is today.
As for how good the Geforce 2 MX 400 is for modern games, well the day Doom3 came out, my trusty Geforce 4 Ti 4600 decided to die on me. 
I had a Geforce 4 MX (which is really just a higher-clocked Geforce 2) and Doom 3 did run, but only at the lowest detail level and 640x480 resolution. Still, it looked pretty good. I then got a GeforceFX 5900 for cheap off of ebay, and now Doom3 & HL2 look very awesome, and are playable at high detail @ 1024x768.
Is this true?
I admit to not knowing much about this stuff, but i was under the impression that you could have the fastesxt computer in the world, but if your graphics card sucks it won’t help. I thought that a poor graphics card was a bottleneck of sorts that cannot be overcome by simply have a faster processor and more RAM.
Am i wrong about this?
Afford one, yes. Feel comfortable opening their computer and swapping out a video card…I’m not so sure. Most people comfortable with a GF2 MX card either don’t play games, or won’t upgrade piecemeal because they don’t want to open a computer.
Just my (not-so) humble opinion.
I’m not sure if this was a dig at me, but I routinely build PC’s from scratch. I just have very little interest in games, so I don’t keep up with the month-by-month changes in popular cards, benchmarks, and requirements. Still, every few years, a killer app like HL2 will attract my attention.
You might be ok with WoW, your card is listed on the site as supported. I’m playing with a Radeon 7200, and though I have to keep everything on lowest settings, it runs fine and doesn’t look bad at all.
Don’t know anything about HL2.
Granted it is looking at higher end cards, but this thread my help.
Yet another video card thread.
Nope, no dig intended. Actually, you fit in the “Don’t play games” category, so you don’t have a need to regularly upgrade and were comfortable with what you had…until HL2.
I play games and I still use HL2 as a reason to get permission from Ms. D_Odds to upgrade. Ms. D_Odds, whose games include Bejeweled, Diamond Mine and Spider Solitaire, and who has me at her beck and call to upgrade should she want, uses the same or similar vidcard.
Wow, in that case I’m screwed, since I only have a 32 MB card in my Inspiron 5150 (I tried to see if they’d upgrade, but no dice…)…the GeForce Go5200
Anybody have any idea if I could get it somehow upgraded?
Until very recently, there was no graphics upgrade option on laptops. Now, certain laptops will allow graphics upgrade. Unfortunately, I don’t think the Dells allow it. Sorry
I had that card before playing Wow and EQ2. They both ran absolutely horrible. I was getting some terrible framerates in the cities. Wow was a little less laggy. It was playable. I switched to a Radeon 256 xt and all is good in the world now.