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
