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Albatron
GeForce MX440 - REVIEW
1st Impressions:
Well the 1st
thing I really noticed about this graphic card, was it’s box, since it’s very shiny,
with it’s silver colour, the card wich came inside, is just another normal GF4
MX440, nothing that really stand out from the other cards I’ve seen, exept for
it’s cooler, because it’s a big orb, and like the box in wich the card came it
has also silver colour, and it gave me a sentiment of reliability, it look’s
good for those who want to overclock their graphics card’s, but that I will
speack of later, the card comes equipped with 64MB DDR memory from Samsung
without heat sinks, clocked @400MHz, and gpu clocked @270MHz, and it also has a
tv-output.
Besides the graphic card, the bundle brought: 1- Drivers CD, 1- S-Video
to AV cable converter, 1- AV Cable, 1- Win DVD CD (software DVD player), 1-
Serious Sam CD (game) and 1-Motocross Mania CD (game) and a user’s manual, it’s
a very complete bundle.
Card Details:
GPU: Nidia's GeForce 4 MX440 working @270MHz
Memory: 64MB DDR Samsung working @200MHz*2
Outputs: analogic monitor, Tv-Out.
Maximum supported resolution: 2048*1536@75Hz
Maximum supported refresh rate: 240Hz @
resolutions going from 640*480 to 1024*768
Overclocking:
Well this is the 1st Albatron card
I’ve reviewed, so I really didn’t know what to expect from this card in terms
of overclockability, but as I’ve said I realy liked their choice of cooler for
the GPU ! Albatron also putted a small quantity of thermal paste between the
cooler and the gpu, it’s really a small quantity, at first sight I tought they
didn’t put anything, but when I looked carefully, I saw that there was thermal
paste there, I tought the heat transfer from the gpu to the core would be
affected by such a small quantity of thermal paste, but I was wrong as you can
see bellow…
GPU: I was able to rise the gpu from the
default speed of 270MHz to 340MHz, this is very nice, an overclock of 70MHz !
This really surprised me ! As I’ve said I tought the lack of sufficient thermal
paste would affect the heat transfer, but it seams as that quantity of thermal
paste is the exact one.
MEMORY: I am glad with this choice of Samsung memory modules from Albatron, they
usualy overclock pretty well. I was able to overclock them from the default of
400MHz to 490MHz ! Very good overclock again ! Almost a diference of 100MHz !
Unfortunatly any more than this and the image would start having problems in 3D
Mark, on the desktop everything looked fine.
Conclusion: This card overclocks very well,
340MHz / 490MHz are great speeds for an un-modified card ! And maybe with a
better thermal paste for the gpu the card could overclock even better, who
knows… Congratulations to Albatron for their nice overclocking choices of:
cooler/thermal paste and memory modules for this card.
Testing:
Testbed:
CPU: AMD Duron @866MHz
Motherboard: Soltek SL75 DRV2
Memory: 256MB DDR PC2100 Crucial
HD: Maxtor 80GB ATA133 7200RPM 2MB Cache
Monitor: Philips 107E
Operating Sistem: Windows 98 SE
Drivers: Nvidia’s 28.32 Detonator Drivers
WHQL Certified
Benchmarks Used:
Madonion's 3DMark 2001 SE @ default settings
and GL XCESS
Results:
Default Speeds (270/400):
GL Xcess:
3D Mark 2001 SE:
Madonion link to score with details: http://service.madonion.com/compare?2k1=3605654
Overclocked Settings (340/490):
Madonion link to score with details: http://service.madonion.com/compare?2k1=3722073
Final Words and Conclusion:
As we can see by the results of 3D Mark 2001
SE, this card is not top performer, it’s performance is some what limited, but
we must remember this is an MX card, not a GF4 Ti, but it’s results are very
good for it’s price range, it performs more or less like a GF3 Ti200, exept for
the lack of pixel shaders. Under Open GL was where this card surprised me the
most, since it’s results were very good ! This card also surprised me with it’s
overclocking capabilities wich are very good also.
For all this reasons I consider this product
a: Recomended Buy !
