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Posted by Thomas
McGuire on April 25, 2002
Manufacturer: eVGA Product:
GeForce
4 MX440
Check
for eVGA
MX440 prices / videocard
price index.
For the first time
ever, NVIDIA has come out at once with a product solution
for every segment of the market, with three GeForce4 MX
models, three high-end GeForce 4 Ti models and a new Quadro,
rather than the staggered releases of previous series. While
some of the more mainstream products have seen a delay as
NVIDIA expects to sell out their now older GeForce3 cards,
the majority of chips have already been adopted by
manufacturers to use on their early 2002 line ups. The
GeForce4 MX440 represents one of NVIDIA’s latest middle
range budget oriented Graphics cards. This particular card
I’ll be testing today (in case it wasn’t too painfully
obvious) will be eVGA’s take on the GeForce 4 MX 440.
(thanks to the guys at Tech
Report who permitted us to use their card shots from
their MX440 review posted here).
As you can see on the
picture above, this MX model sports eVGA’s unique
asymmetric cooling system, which for some reason reminded me
of a Tuna can when I first saw the card. Not all
manufacturers have been including custom cooling on the
lower end MX models so this is a nice plus for eVGA’s
card.
(another shot taken from TR
;)).
The GeForce 4 MX
despite of its name is more of what I would call a
“GeForce2 MX 2”, which after all is what it’s intended
to replace, but you know, marketing doesn’t work that way.
As you’re probably aware, there has been some concern
raised over the cards’ naming. While the GeForce 2 MX was
a cut-down GeForce 2, the GeForce 4 MX is not a simple
cut-down GeForce 4 Ti. The main feature that it has compared
with the Titanium models is Lightspeed Memory Architecture
II.
Personally I’m not
too annoyed about all this, to be fair what else could they
have named it? GeForce 3 MX would suggest it’s based on
the GeForce 3, which it wouldn’t be, so again a similar
problem (It would also suggest that it’s much older than
it really is). That said, this will be more of a problem to
the less well educated consumer (After all if the box says
GeForce 4 on it…). It’s also
worth noting NVIDIA doesn’t particularly market this as a
gamers graphics card either.
At the time of
posting eVGA’s GeForce4 MX440 was available for a less
than $100,
showing that the card will certainly have an appeal to
buyers on a budget, after all, the only cards you could get
for a similar price before was the GeForce2 Ti and the
Radeon 7500, I think.
Here’s what John
Carmack (id Software) had to say about the name confusion
thing:
NVIDIA
has really made a mess of the naming conventions here. I
always thought it was bad enough that GF2 was just a speed
bumped GF1, while GF3 had significant architectural
improvements over GF2. I expected GF4 to be the speed bumped
GF3, but calling the NV17 GF4-MX really sucks.
GF4-MX
will still run Doom properly, but it will be using the NV10
codepath with only 2 texture units & no vertex shaders.
A GF3 or Radeon 8500 will be much better performers. The
GF4-MX may still be the card of choice for many people
depending on pricing, especially considering that many games
won't use 4 textures & vertex programs, but damn, I wish
they had named it something else.
The software bundle
was exceptionally weird. I say this because several of the
items on the CD don’t work properly with the GeForce 4 MX
(e.g. 3 of the Tech demos provided require the nfiniteFX
engine or other DirectX 8 T&L unit either I’d assume).
Meanwhile one of the game demos provided, Comanche 4, is a
DirectX 8 Game which supports Pixel & Vertex Shaders,
neither of which the GeForce 4 MX support in Hardware (You
also get a Voucher that will let you get this Game at a
discount).
In something of a
marketing mix-up the actual box for the Graphics card itself
features shots from 3 demos, all 3 of which use the
aforementioned DirectX 8 features which the GeForce 4 MX
doesn’t support. Also, the bundled PowerDVD doesn’t
support the MPEG decoding features of the GeForce 4 MX 440
until patched (Currently I'm unaware if this affects other
new Graphics cards which are similarly shipping with
PowerDVD XP bundled). If this was the
Eurovision, eVGA would be getting “Nil point” on the
Software bundle. Then again this is a low budget graphics
card so much of this can be forgiven & it’s likely the
only thing of use here for you will be PowerDVD XP.
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