Today’s video card market has become quite exciting. Much like the processor market, the degrees of power available today are simply incredible. Even ‘low end’ video cards today are tens or hundreds of times more powerful than video cards of just a few years ago. Certainly companies like 3dfx, ATi, and even S3 and Matrox have helped in bringing about the low end, yet high powered video card, but no one company has done as much as nVidia with its GeForce 2 MX.

For really the first time, users could have all the features and abilities of the state of the art accelerators (albeit slightly slower), for under $100 in most cases. GeForce 2 MX cards are simple, fast enough, and have more than sufficient features to play any of today’s games, all for an extremely fair price. And because of that, for a long time, we’ve been big proponents of the MX to just about any light to average gamer.

That changed slightly a couple months ago when we reviewed Hercules’ Kyro II-based 3D Prophet 4500. While the Kyro didn’t offer the bells and whistles the MX could (like T&L units, or TwinView), in terms of raw performance, it defeated even a GeForce 2 GTS. At that point, if you wanted a pure gaming card, and didn’t have a need for things like TwinView, the Kyro II seemed like a pretty decent idea.

Since then, nVidia has revamped its MX line, and is now offering different flavors. Today we’ll be taking a look at one of those new flavors, namely the GeForce 2 MX 400. Hercules was kind enough to provide us with its latest MX 400-based board, the 3D Prophet II MX 400. Today we’ll take a look at both the chip and the card, and attempt to answer the question of whether the MX 400 is a good buy, or whether you ought to stick with a Kyro II-based solution like Hercules’ 3D Prophet 4500.