Written By:
Date Posted: April 15, 2002

We've recently been lucky enough to get our hands on the new MSI G4MX440-T Video card. For a little background on the G4MX440-T, It's based on the GeForce 4 Mx chipset, which is geared towards the casual gamer in both price and performance. The G4MX440-T is the card most geared towards the gaming novice and goes for about $139.99.

Specifications

Features:

-- 256-bit 3D and 2D graphics accelerator
-- Integrated second-generation Transform and Lighting engines
-- 34 million triangles per second setup engine with Z-cull and Z-clear
-- 1.1 billion texels per second
-- 1.3 pixel combiner operations
-- 32-bit color with 32-bit z/stencil
-- Cube environment mapping
-- DirectX® and S3TC® texture compression
-- Digital Vibrance Control
-- Dual CRTC/Simultaneous Dual Display (same or different surfaces)
-- Integrated dual LVDS Transmitter supporting LCD panels up to 2048x1536
-- Integrated 350 MHz Palette-DAC for analog VGA monitors up to 2048x1536
-- Integrated NTSC/PAL TV encoder supporting resolutions up to 1024x768
-- DVD- and HDTV-ready MPEG-2 decoding up to 1920x1080i ATSC format
-- MPEG-2 hardware decode, including Inverse Discrete Cosine Transform and Motion
Compensation

Compatiblity:

-- Supports VIP1.1 interface
-- Supports Microsoft® DirectX® 8.0, 7.0, 6.0, and 5.0 (IDCT)
-- Fully compliant support for OpenGL 1.2 for all Windows operating systems and Linux®
-- Up to 6.4 GB/second memory bandwidth
-- Supports 128-bit DDR, 64-bit DDR, and 32-bit DDR SDRAM

Graphics Modes:

-640x480 8/16/32 bit colors with 150Hz
-800x600 8/16/32 bit colors with 150Hz
-1024x768 8/16/32 bit colors with 120Hz
-1152x864 8/16/32 bit colors with 120Hz
-1280x1024 8/16/32 bit colors with 100Hz
-1600x1200 8/16/32 bit colors with 85Hz
-1920x1200 8/16/32 bit colors with 75Hz
-2048x1536 8/16/32 bit colors with 60Hz

Being geared more toward the "casual gamer," the MSI G4MX440-T has a software bundle that any hardcore gamer would respect. The bundle features No One Lives Forever, a personal favorite of mine, Aquanox, Sacrifice, as well as a 7 in 1 Game cd packed with demos of Ballistics, Tom Clancy's Rogue Spear-Black Thorn, Tom Clanc'ys Ghost Recon, Commanche 4, Fallout Tactics, Swat 3: Close Quarters Battle, and Serious Sam : The first encounter. This is more than enough to get some one interested in games, and features some of the better games of the past few years.

The card comes with 64mb of DDR graphics memory chips, which operate at 250mhz.

The first thing you notice when you see the MX is the GPU cooler. It can best be described as spherical golden cooler, with a shiny sticker on top saying MSI.

The rest of the card is pretty simple, and the exterior interface has a s-video out plug and the typical RGB connector for the monitor. The card is pretty simple, and has enough features to keep the audience the card is aimed at, the budget or casual gamer, busy playing games and not worrying about frame rates.

System Used to Run Tests:

Pentium 4 - 1.4 ghz
Sony 52x cd-rom drive
Msi 850 Pro motherboard (4x agp)
Creative Labs Audigy Gamer sound card
256mb Crucial Rambus Ram
Western Digital 80gb 7200 rpm IDE hard drive

The G4MX440-T performed relatively well in the Quake 3 benchmarks, but not higher than the Asus G3 Ti200.

The Return to Castle Wolfenstein Demo ran well at 800x600, but as the resolutions increased, the performance dropped significantly. At 1600x1200, the game was utterly unplayable, showing that the MSI G4MX440-T is not for the hardcore gamer, but still makes a nice upper mid level card.

The Medal of Honor Demo ran smoothly in all the tests we did, and the game was playable at all resolutions. The Geforce3 Ti 200 still performed better, but you get what you pay for and the GeForce3 is more expensive.

As you can see, the card had above average 3D Mark scores. For the most part, the higher the resolution, the less performance you get on the card (as always), but the 1600x1200x32 resolution scored better than the 1280x768x32. As the resolution got higher, you could tell the card could not handle it by the extremely low fps at 1600x900. You get what you pay for, and if you buy this card you'll get above average performance and good value for the price.

Final Words

The G4MX440-T is a good card, if you're not a hardcore gamer. As the tests show, you get what you pay for, but for the casual gamer with an older card ( and a computer that can handle the G4MX440-T) this card is really a good value. You get Aquanox, Sacrifice, and No One Lives Forever just out of the box, so any gamer can get into the card the moment the card is installed.

The price, around $100 (), is just about right for anyone to get into. The TV-Out function of the card is also a plus to the gamer that'd like to fool around and put his games on a t.v. But as you all know, the G4MX440-T doesn't really compare to the TI's in either price or performance. In the 3d card market, you get what you pay for, and when buying a G4MX440-T from MSI, you get everything the casual gamer would want or need and a good card to last you for a good time to come.

Pros:

Inexpensive
Variety of Games
Features (Tv-out, Nview etc.)

Cons:
Performance not as high as other cards (GF3 TI etc.)

Agree? Disagree? Discuss it in our forums.

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