Avoid this card!
Written: Feb 26 '04
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Product Rating:
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Pros: It can show picture on the display
Cons: You would not want to look at this display picture
The Bottom Line: Not a viable solution for an analogue monitor
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| aspushkin51's Full Review: Mad Dog Multimedia Prowler Mx440Se Graphic |
The price was right, the card had TV-out, two video-outs, one of which is analogue/digital, 64 MB very fast DDR memory and all niceties of GF MX440-8X chip, which is claimed to be faster than GF FX5200. MX440-8X does not support DirectX-9 in hardware, however. It was with a silver heat sink and red PCB. You can see the picture of a 128 MB version with second VGA-out omitted here:
http://www.primetek.com.hk/vga_MX440%208X%20DDR.html
Plugged it in and after several re-starts with showing garbage on the screen it came alive. The fan is quiet this time. However, there are shades to the right of any vertical black, blue, red or yellow line or letter. I checked my monitor replacing this card with Permedia-2 PCI (Video Blaster Exxtreme), which is 8 years old: no shades at 100 Hz. This means that the monitor is fine. Put back the Mad Dog, re-installed the recent NVidia drivers - shades again! Hooked the DVI output via a DVI-to-VGA adaptor: no improvement. The chip is identified by SiSoft Sandra as "Geforce4 MX 440SE with AGP8X".
Replaced it with another red-colored board. Same fuzzy text, dark picture. It crashes, if "fast writes" are enabled in the BIOS of VIA KT400 motherboard from Biostar (M7VIT Pro).
I am under the impression now that in case of this "budget" card version (red board, 4 Samsung-343 memory chips, 4 memory positions vacant, silver "Primetek" heat sink), Mad Dog, and effectively Primetek/Hongkong is collecting a non-standard grade of microchip run from NVidia, identified as "Geforce4 MX 440SE with AGP8X", while better testing chips identified as "Geforce4 MX 440 with AGP8X" are sold elsewhere.
Recommended:
No
Amount Paid (US$): 34 after reb
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Epinions.com ID:
aspushkin51
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Reviews written: 2
Trusted by: 0 members
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