Introduction

eVGA e-GeForce 4 MX440 Review

This content was originally featured on Amdmb.com and has been converted to PC Perspective’s website. Some color changes and flaws may appear.

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eVGA have been on the video card scene for quite a while now and have quite allot of quality products under their belt, ranging from the TNT 2 to the GeForce 4 Ti4600.

With the recent release of the GeForce 4 by Nvidia just a month ago, and with the current lack of any retail GeForce 4 Ti cards, it seems quite appropriate to show you one of the many GeForce 4 MX 440 on the market at the moment. Even though it was quite apparent that Nvidia was emphasizing the high end Ti range of cards at the launch of the GeForce 4; it is obvious that not everyone will go out and spend $400 on Nvidia’s new flagship card

Now there is no point thinking that the GeForce 4 MX cards will compare to any of the GeForce 3 cards because its not meant to, it is here to replace the GeForce 2 MX400 and that it does well; this will be demonstrated within the benchmarks later in the review.

Also it must be noted that the MX range of the GeForce 4 are not DirectX 8 compliant let alone 8.1 and does not come with the dual Vertex shader or Pixel shader; that you find in the nfiniteFX II Engine that we see on the GeForce 4 Ti range.

The eVGA e-GeForce 4MX 440 follows Nvidia’s reference design quite closely and only varies from it slightly; the only real difference is the lack of the DVI connector and eVGA’s asymmetric cooling system (ACS), that I must admit worked very well.

The lack of the DVI connector is most likely to keep the cost down, I say this because the PCB has a place for the connector and considering that this is a budget card and having a DVI connector to connect to your nice new $500 15″ LCD monitor, really puts the system in a different league and then you couldn’t call it budget then could you.

The e-GeForce 4MX 440 comes with 4 X 16 MB of Samsung 128 bit BGA 5ns DDR ram chips, two on the front and two on the back of the PCB and this totals up to 64Mb, that has never been seen on a budget card before. Because this memory is lower power than the older memory you will find on the GeForce 3 range, it gives off less heat and because of this you no longer have the need for ram sinks when the ram is at its default clock speed.

So what do you get then, first of all you get a CD with a copy of the 27.20 Detonators, the driver installation went very smoothly using VGA’s installer; also you get the following demo games; Comanche 4.0, Land Warrior, and Tachyon. Finally you get a fully working copy of PowerDVD XP 4.0 on the second CD

It would have been nice to get a full game, like Serious Sam but you have to remember that this is only a budget card after all.

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One of the best features that you get with the GeForce 4 range of cards is NView, which is like ATi’s hydravision that has been available for some time for the Radeon. Some people may disagree and say that it is a gimmick but I use my PC as a Home Entertainment System and I store all my films to the hard drive; and in the past I could connect my home TV to the S-Video or AV out to watch a film but that would not let me use the computer for other things at the same time, now with the help of NView, I can minimize Windows Media Player and carry on with writing this review while my daughter watches Monsters Inc.

Also NView integrates with other applications very well, for example on a card that had dual monitor support I could double right click on a link in IE6 and it would send that page to the other monitor, while keeping the original page unchanged in the primary monitor. It is also good if you use multiple applications at once, because you can have photoshop displayed on the secondary monitor while keeping Golive on the primary monitor; giving you space to edit those images before you throw them into the HTML.

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