After much searching, I have finally found the graphics card in my computer on Epinions. Since it was in the computer when I bought it, don’t expect much opinion on the installation process (though all AGP cards are pretty easy to install normally), but I can tell you a bit about it.

Maybe what I can tell you will even be useful, who knows?


Back at the end of 2002, when I got this computer, the GeForce4 MX 440 was pretty close to being top of the range. Nowadays of course it’s nowhere near, but for many people it will still be a good buy – second-hand prices are very low, with a quick peek at Ebay revealing starting prices from under a dollar!

It really depends on your gaming habits. If you tend to stick to older games (say, pre-2004) then you shouldn’t have too much trouble at least running the games with the GeForce 4MX. You might not be able to run them at full capacity, but you can still play them with reasonable screen levels. Normally I stick to 800x600 screen resolution for more demanding games, which seems to work fine. Occasionally you’ll get a game running very slowly; if so, your best bet is to try switching from 32-bit colour to 16-bit colour (this worked fine with Robin Hood: Defender of the Crown, which crawled along in 32-bit colour but worked fine in 16-bit, without a really appreciable loss of quality in the graphics. (Dropping to 24-bit colour might work if the game allows it.)

As far as newer games though, this isn’t a great card. Games such as Knights of the Old Republic offer much fancier graphics modes than the GeForce 4 MX can cope with, and that’s actually quite an old game. The lack of PixelShader model support is a major drawback , with two games I really want to get, LEGO Star Wars 2 and Broken Sword 4, being out of its capabilities. It’s true that by using a program such as 3Danalyze you can emulate PixelShader or force the program to ignore it altogether, meaning that you can play games requiring it. I did this with the first LEGO Star Wars game, but the quality of the graphics and range of available graphics modes dropped, along with reduction in speed due to the extra system resources used by the emulation. This means in a nutshell that if you want to play newer games, and particularly if you want to play newer games near their top performance capabilities, then you really need something a lot more powerful than this card. It’s 64Mb seemed great 4 years ago but is now seriously going to struggle.

For people who just want to potter around and play the odd 3D game that might be a few years old, it’s fine however. I run the desktop in 1280 x 1024 32-bit colour mode at 60Hz on a 17” e-machines monitor, I know this isn’t amazing but I’ve never had a problem with it and it’s completely flicker-free. (Also remember that your maximum modes will be affected by your monitor.) It’s been running for 4 years without a major problem so reliability isn’t a problem.

There are a couple of potential problems however that you should be aware of if you’re thinking of getting this card. I say potential problems because I’m not convinced if the problem is with the card itself or not. In some games, most notably Worms Armageddon, the colours go funny after a while. Sometimes almost immediately, sometimes after quite a while. Occasionally it will revert back just as inexplicably. I can’t explain this and it only occurs on certain games, never on most. I’ve not heard of any other user of this card having the same problem, so maybe I’m just special…

The other thing is that I would advise you not to update the drivers from the nVidea site. I did this once and it was fine, but the most recent time I tried updating the drivers it sent the graphics to the funny farm and the only solution was to reinstall the old drivers. This could of course have been a one-off, but if you do buy second-hand, make sure you get the original drivers disc as well.

Specs

Fill Rate: 1.1 Billion Texels/Sec
Triangles per Second: 34 Million
Memory Bandwidth: 6.4GB/Sec
Maximum Memory: 64MB

Verdict

If you’re not looking for a particularly high performance card and want something cheap and reliable, the GeForce4 MX 440 AGP may well fit the bill. If you want to play anything graphically impressive released in the last couple of years onwards though, you definitely need a more powerful beast than this..

Thanks for reading,

CaptainD (who is currently looking for his next graphics card…)



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** Update (22nd January 2009) **

If a powerful gaming PC is what you're after, a good choice is the Packard Bell iPower X9810 - much includes the powerful nVidia GeForce 9800GT graphics card.

Recommended: No

Amount Paid (US$): N/A