It would depend on how fast your system is, if you have a Athlon or P4 I'd try to get the Geforce3. Anything else you might as well go for a G2. I only say only decide financially because no matter what system you have if you plan on upgrading it sometime the Geforce 3 will last longer. i'm still using a geforce 2mx, on a athlon XP 1700+ and I run everything as good as any other geforce2, the extra speed isnt really needed imho. I speak from experience I had a Gainward Geforce 2 Pro 450 and the card didnt give any tangible benefits in any of my games (max payne,sacrifice,black and white,madden2002) so I sold it. The image quality is no different, but it would be different going from a DX7 card to a DX8 with programmable TnL available. Thats why I say who cares about the speed a MX speed card is enough for me but anyone who 'plays' 3dmark wouldn't agree. My monitor is only 19inch and the super high res that the faster GF2 cards offer me just doesnt look good on that small of a monitor. I run my games in 1024x768x32 usually normal or max detail, no slowdown in any of the games listed above and I have a slow 6ns MX...
If I was to buy a card right now I would get the GTS-V not the MX because for the price difference (abt $10 American dollars) you do get quite a jump in speed that I said was not worth spending the extra money for. Yes the speed gains out of the upper end Geforce2's does help but what I'm trying to say is theres no reason to spend more unless you have a gigantic monitor or for some reason like FSAA which never turned me on. ALL Geforce2's will choke and die in DX8 games so that extra speed is not going to help. Some tests show the Geforce2 Ultra gaining 1fps over a GTS in DX8 games like Aquanox.
The GTS-V is a 'value' GTS but very cheap for what you get. They are underclocked slightly but everyone who has had experience with it claim that getting to stock GTS speeds is not a problem for any of the cards. Someone also said they checked the core and they are marked as normal GTS cores.
As for other options, ATI doesnt offer anything near as good a deal as the GTS-V, a Radeon 32ddr can be picked up for the same price but that card really isnt in the GTS's league as far as speed is concerned. Some will argue about image quality, deepness of colors ect, or that Geforce's 2D quality above 1024x768 is poor but my card does fine at 1024x768 in 2D.. your monitor plays a very large part in that also but people neglect that fact.
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