geforce 4 mx 440 sucky performance?

[Farlander]

I recently got a geforce 4 mx440 128MB DDR and although the performance is good, it is not what I would have expected from a DDR card. I mean, I can't even put on anti-aliasing with old games like deus ex and mohaa, without them starting to drag. The performance isn's that bad with AA2X, but don't even dare trying Quinnox or 4X. And 2X makes newer games like Morrowind and UT2003 almost unplayable in some areas.

System specs
GF4 mx 440 ST labs
Gigabyte GA7-VAX
256MB DDR 333 Unique ram
athlon xp 1800

What I expected from this card in this system was to at least be able to run old games at maximum quality( trilinear, AA4X, 32bit, compressed textures) with still acceptable framerates. Was I kidding myself or is the performance not what it should be.
Also, how big a power supply should I have for this system? Is 300watts enough or could that be my problem?
Please, even if you have a similar performance problem or don't have a performance problem, but don't have any helpful input, just post your system specs and drivers.

Thanks

 

[pmonett]

Sorry to be blunt, but you might have been kidding yourself.
Check out some benchmarks here :

http://www6.tomshardware.com/graphic/20020418/vgacharts-01.html

You'll notice that the 440 gets the lowest score of the GF4-MX family.
You might not be aware that the GF4-MX family is not GF4 technology, but souped-up GF2 technology.
Check out the stats here :

http://www17.tomshardware.com/graphic/20020206/geforce4-06.html

The most important remark I copy here : "GeForce3 cards are actually far more advanced than GeForce4 MX cards!".
In other words, you have been caught by the marketing lies of the spinmasters. I have disagreed with the naming scheme ever since it came out, since they bring confusion to those who do not know where to look for technical details.
Such is the unfortunate state of things today.
That being said, you should still have enough power to play in 1024x768 no ?
As for 300W, I have abandoned that a year or two ago. I have 400W PSUs on my systems now. But you do not list your IDE peripherals, so there is no way to judge whether or not you have enough juice.
Since you ask, my system specs on my game rig are :

ASUS A7V8X
AMD XP 2600+
2x256Mb DDR333
GeForce Ti4400
60Gb and 120Gb Western Digital UATA100
Kenwood CD-R 72x TrueSpeed
Sony CD-RW 42x
Audigy SB

 

[Treeking]

Farlander: Unfortunately for Nvidia users, the misnomered "GF4 MX" series was a huge disappointment. Other benches run at websites other than at Toms website(the link above) didn't give the MXes as high a rating as Tom. A GF2 Ultra or any GF3(and some ATI offerings) would destroy the MX series. Of course they were somewhat impressive if you previously had an 8 or 16 meg card. Also,not knowing your complete system specs, I would go for a larger psu myself.You might post over at the old MadOnion forums and see if you can snag some OC tips.....

http://discuss.futuremark.com/forum/wwwthreads.pl

Sorry about the disheartening news, but I have to agree with pmonett.

 

[Farlander]

Here are my complete system specs:

GF4 mx 440 ST labs
Gigabyte GA7-VAX with onboard lan and realtek ac97 codec
256MB DDR 333 Unique ram
athlon xp 1800+
LG52X cdr
maxtor 20GB ata100
seagate 8GB ata66

The reason I'm asking about the PSU is that although the GF4 isn't as good as I thought it should be, friends of mine with Duron 1.2 and GF2 mx400 64MB are getting almost the same performance as me.(But I have to add, he has 512megs of ram)
And the other thing is that all these tweaks you find on the net that are supposed to make your system fly, don't seem to make any difference to me, even defragging and setting your swap file to a fixed size, which allot of people swear by.
At the moment I have to decide between more ram, because UT2003 and Morrowind are quite greedy on ram. Any extra input you could give me will be appreciated.

 

[paparazi]

There are an awful lot of people out there who are disapointed with there GF4 MX440 cards, all I can say is we sell Shed loads of them in our shop, mostly cheap generic types and one thing has become very clear, Stay well away from SDram based cards, we have stocked both (but not any longer!) in our own tests on a KT266a motherboard with an XP2.0+ the SDram equipt versions of the GF4 MX440 barely touch 2,800 points in3D Benchmark 2001SE whereas the DDR endowed GF4 MX440's get just under 6,000 points, thats double!! and an amazing differance.
We find that at just £13UK ($17US) MORE retail than a GF2 MX400, the GF4 MX440 DDR offers a useful increase in performance over the old GF2, but it has to be DDR memory onboard.
Martin Replying helps further our knowledge, without comment leaves us wondering.

 

[pmonett]

UT2k3 is greedy on everything, Farlander. If you play that game you'll need more than just RAM.
You know my specs, but you do not know that I barely pull 70fps on average with Unreal 2. I especially hate when I'm walking down a corridor, everything fluid, and just because I turn to check a corridor . . BANG, frame stutter for a quarter second, then fluid again.
I've been told Det43 drivers correct that problem. I'll be checking that tonight.
In any case, tweaking your card is not going to bring you much more than already have. You can't tweak a crippled bird and expect it to soar.
If you're into top-of-the-line first person shooters like UT2K3, you need more horsepower, pure and simple.
A GF4 Ti something, or an ATI R9800 Pro is where you want to be.