XFX is a pretty new player in the video card buisness, they are a division of Pine Technology which is directed more twoard the gamers and high end users of computers rather than the everyday person. The GeForce4 MX graphics processing unit (GPU) brings a new level of graphics performance and flexibility to the mainstream desktop PC. By incorporating NVIDIA’s innovative nView display technology, highly efficient Lightspeed Memory Architecture (LMA) II, and advanced Accuview antialiasing techniques, the GeForce4 MX GPU is the most feature-rich, cost-effective, and highly integrated GPU available for the mainstream market.
All of the Geforce 4 MX cards use the new NV17 core. This core does not have a pixel or vertex shader engine, however it uses the Transform and Lighting engine to provide a comparable solution.
The Geforce 4 series also has 3 new technologies which are being used, below is a quick overview of those capabilities.
- nView Display Technology
The nView hardware and software technology combination delivers maximum flexibility for multi-display options, and provides unprecedented end-user control of the desktop experience. nView allows end-users to select any combination of multiple displays, including digital flat panels, analog CRTs, and TVs, and to modify the display properties using an intuitive software interface. - Accuview Antialiasing (AA)
The Accuview Antialiasing subsystem with advanced multisampling hardware delivers full-scene antialiased quality at performance levels never before seen. - Lightspeed Memory Architecture (LMA) II
LMA II boosts effective memory bandwidth by up to 300%. Radical new technologies including Z-occlusion culling, fast Z-clear, and auto pre-charge? Effectively multiply the memory bandwidth to ensure fluid frame rates for the latest 3D and 2D games and applications.
The Abit card has the following specs, which most of the other MX440 cards should be quite similar to.
Performance:
- Graphics Core: 256-bit
- Memory Interface: 64MB
- Memory Bandwidth (GB/sec): 6.4
- Fill Rate (texels/sec.): 1.1 billion
- Triangles/sec.: 34 million
- Effective Memory Clock Rate (MHz): 400
- RAMDACs (MHz) (each have 2 RAMDAC): 350
Monitor support:
- D-shell (15-pin) VGA connector
Display support:
- Register compatible with VGA
- DVI-Out for sharp LCD monitor output
- TV out Module enabling big-screen gaming, digital timeshifting VCR, and video-editing applications
Features:
- nView Display Technology
- Lightspeed Memory Architecture (LMA) II Technology
- 64MB 128-bit DDR Frame Buffer Memory
- MX Memory Crossbar
- Integrated Dual 350MHz Dac’s
- Integrated Dual-Channel TMDS Transmitter
- Integrated TV Encoder Supporting 1024X768 Resolution
- Accuview Antialiasing
- Video Processing Engine (VPE)
- AGP 4X with AGP Texturing and Fast Writes
- Highest Quality and Highest Performance Microsoft Windows XP Support
- Unified Driver Architecture (UDA)
- Microsof DirectX Optimizations and Support
- Complete OpenGL 1.3 and OpenGL support
Warranty:
- 2 years
The box is really cool looking, you can really tell that XFX is trying to market the card towards people who want high quality gaming video cards rather than those people who just want their computer to work. It’s cool that you can see the card through the little window in the box.
The card comes in a plastic container to keep it safe, you also get a S-Video cable so you can take advantage of the TV out feature of this card. You get a trial version of DroneZ, Space Haste, and GunLock and a full version of PowerDVD which are not pictured because they were out of CDs at the time of shipping.
The card comes with a brownish PCB which is unique, I have not seen many video cards with a brown PCB. It is not as stunning as some of the other colors out there but different people like different colors, or so I’m told.
The card has a standard VGA input for your average CRT and also has S-Video out so that you can hook your video card to your TV. The card is lacking a DVI connection so if you are looking to use a LCD you will have to get a converter or get another video card.
The card comes stock with passive cooling of the GPU and lacking RAMsinks. I would have really liked to have seen active cooling on the GPU and even some RAMsinks. I know that they did not include either of these things on this video card because it is for more of a non-overclocker and more end user rather than high end gamer. A good reason to have better cooling on lower end video cards is the ability to overclock them better. When I removed the heatsink on the GPU I found that about half of the core was not covered with thermal goop which is also not good because it does not have active cooling it needs to transfer heat to the heatsink which is harder to do with no thermal interface material. These are a few things which I think XFX should address in the future.
I will be using 3DMark2001SE, Vulpine GLmark, Quake 3, and Serious Sam as benchmarks. All of the testing was done with all the eye candy turned on and everything at it’s highest. A 3DPower Geforce 3, Abit Siluro Geforce 4 MX440 will be used to compare against the XFX Geforce 4 MX440. I benchmarks with the resolutions of 1024×768, 1280×1024, and 1600×1200, I did not do 800×600 because I don’t feel that many people out there are using that low of a resolution.
Test bed:
- EPoX 8KHA+
- AMD Athlon XP 1900+
- 512MB PC2100 Crucial DDR
- Sound Blaster Live! Platinum 5.1
- Linksys LNE100TX
- Nokia 445Pro 21″ Triniton
- Windows 2000 SP2
- Nvidia 27.20 drivers
- Via 4.37 4-in-1 Driver
As you can see, in 3DMark2001SE the XFX Geforce 4 MX440 does not do very well. The main reason the score is so low is because it was not able to run 3 of the tests. It was unable to run the environment bump mapping and the 2 pixel shading tests, which are Geforce 3 features and this card does not include. Keep in mind though that these features are used very little if at all in any real games out right now. You can also see that both of the Geforce 4 cards are pretty close in score with one edging out the other and visa versa depending on the resolution.
Again the Geforce 4 MX440 did not perform very well in Vulpine GLmark because of the fact that it has no Geforce 3 features and I had them turned on for the benchmarking. Like I said before though most of these features are not used in real games, still you can see that both of the Geforce 4 cards perform almost identically.
The Quake 3 testing went really well, unlike the testing in 3DMark2001SE and Vulpine GLmark the Geforce 4 MX440 did really well. As you can see the Geforce 4 MX440 was only around 10-12 FPS lower than the stock Geforce 3. As you can see there the real world performance of this card is much different that of benchmarking programs. The XFX Geforce 4 MX440 did not perform as well against the Abit Geforce 4 MX440 but the difference is not that much.
The Serious Sam testing the results were more like those of 3DMark2001SE and Vulpine GLmark, the Geforce 4 MX440 did not perform as well as it did in Quake 3. This is due to the fact that Serious Sam uses more high detail features than quake 3 I also believe that it does use some Geforce 3 features which the Geforce 4 MX cards do not have. The Abit Geforce 4 MX440 still out performed the XFX card for some reason.
I went ahead and overclocked this card as far as it would go before it started to have artifacts. I was able to push the card from a stock setting of 270MHz core and 400MHz memory to 310MHz core and 470MHz memory. I was actually able to overclock this card more than I was with the Abit Siluro Geforce 4 MX440, this was really surprising because the Abit card has much better cooling than that of the XFX one. If I was to add some good active cooling to the XFX card I am sure that it would be able to do a lot more. In all of the testing I left all the settings the same.
After overclocking the card there was a pretty good increase in the scores at all resolutions. The scores increase dropped as the resolutions increased which is expected.
Vulpine GLMark gained about 3-4 FPS from the overclocking, this isn’t much of a concern because of the fact that it is a synthetic benchmark and the fact that it has none of the Geforce 3 features.
With a resolution of 1024×768 and 1280×1024 Quake 3 gained about 13 FPS more but at 1600×1200 it only gained about 5 which is still not very bad.
With a resolution of 1024×768 and 1280×1024 Serious Sam gained about 6-7 FPS more but at 1600×1200 it only gains about 3 more FPS. As you can see even overclocked at 1600×1200 Serious Sam is only getting 33 FPS which is where games start to get choppy.
Conclusion
Like the previous Geforce 4 MX440 that I reviewed I can still say that this card is not for hardcore gamers. This card is a good card for those of you who are looking for a cheap solution and are not worried about getting the best FPS in every game with a high resolution. There are a few things that should be changed with this card, active cooling should be used and more thermal compound should be applied. I did like however that this card was able to overclock pretty well and still perform good in all tests. Overall I would give this video card a 7/10, I would like to thank XFX for sending this card over for me to review and for being so patient with me while I finished this review.
Pros
- Cool brown PBC
- Good overclocker
- Low price
Cons
- Passive cooling
- poorly applied thermal compound
- No Geforce 3 features