MX440 Shootout Review
Reviewed by: Bosco
Reviewed on: September 19, 2002
: MSI, ASUS, AOpen, and Abit
: GF City Computers
Price: N/A
Introduction
A video card is one of the most important upgrades that you can make to improve performance, but it can also be one of the hardest upgrades to decide on which card to choose. Nvidia and ATI are the two names that dominate the video card market. From GeForce cards from Nvidia to Radeon cards from ATI it can be difficult to decide. Today were are going to look at four MX440 cards from Nvidia to help you choose a decent performance budget card.
MSI
What you get:
Abit
AOpen
What you get:
ASUS
What you get:
For the nVidia cards you either have the TI or MX series. The TI cards are the most powerful but are the most expensive. MX cards are aimed towards people that are on a budget or people that want a video card that supports newer technology but don't want to spend big bucks on a TI series card. The Four we have choose are here because performance and price. These four are the best that we found that are worth mentioning. There are so many companys making video cards now that it is very difficult to choose a card. All four cards we have choosen have the same specs as well the same features and support.
Specifications
Memory:
TV-out:
Driver support:
System Requirements:
These cards have an S-Video out adapter and a VGA plug in. There are alot of people that like to run DVD movies from their computer to their TV, this is where S-Video comes in. All you have to do is connect the card from the video card to your TV and boot the computer and you will see the desktop on your TV screen. You will have to hook up your audio cables as well for your sound.
Heatsinks
These cards come with fans on the GPU's except for the Asus, I still don't know why they didn't put one on it.
Installation
This is very easy to do. Just take out your old card and pop your new one in and power up the system and install the drivers. Make sure that the card is pushed all the way into the slot or you may not get the machine to boot up.
Testing
3dmark2001, Comanche 4 and Quake.
Test Setup:
3dmark2001
Scores are close but as you can see the MSI just edged out the Abit, with the MSI taking 2 out of 3 tests.
Once again MSI wins, it beat out the Abit 2 out of 3 tests. Drivers locked out on 4XAA tests on the AOpen and Asus.
Asus took this test but not by much. None of the cards would run the test with AAX4 turned on.
Comanche 4
Very even here, you be the judge Aopen or Asus.
I think the drivers once again were preventing the AAX4 tests from being run properly. Abit and MSI were even.
Same problem again drivers not letting tests run properly on normal testing on the Abit and AOpen. Asus or MSI would have to be the choice here. None of the MX440 cards would run AAX4 tests.
Quake 3
Scores are fairly close but the winner would have to be Asus just beat out the other cards by a few frames.
Conclusion
Well all four cards performed well, it is kinda hard to choose a clear winner. Asus and the MSI performed the best overall and consistantly. The Aopen is really the only card that didn't come with anything extra, but it was the cheapest. I personally like the MSI because of the extra stuff you get with the card and for $159CAN its a steal. I think that any card that we tested would be a good choice, you would just have to decide if games were important enough to pay the extra price.
Pros
Cons