Albatron GeForce4 MX440 Video Card Review
Albatron
GeForce4 MX440 Video Card Review
By Patrick
aka.
Acid-Phreak
What we got:
After its week long travel
from Taiwan to Ohio, it arrived in the traditional brown box packaging with
the video card neatly packed away inside. Inside I found what most people
find when they are buying a video card nowadays. A bright flashy box (makes
it hard to take a picture of it since everything reflects off it). I call
this "flashy marketing". My
theory: They want to get people to recognize their product first on the
shelf. If they can get you to pick it up then they have done their job.
Hopefully after reading the "flashy text" you will want to purchase it.
The Card:
Inside you find the GeForce4 MX440 video card. Now some manufactures have
carried over the "wow" factor they employ in their packaging (like above) to their
PCB, but Albatron has not followed suit. They use the traditional green
PCB (Jacks says its blue green but what does he know. He is part color blind).
You will notice below that although the MX440 GPU will support dual monitors,
it only has the VGA and S-Video ports on the card. A quick check of their
website shows in
the charts that this card does not come with the DVI port. So don't be fooled by
the picture on their website of the card with a DVI port.
One place they do use some flashy pieces is on their cooling fan they
mounted on the GPU. Notice the little added bonus of the Albatron logo sticker
in the center of the fan.
To supplement the card, Albatron has packaged a couple full retail version games
with the card. One of them being Serious Sam and the other is Motocross
Mania. Unfortunately my card came with neither game. It did however
come with WinDVD and a utility cd containing the drivers for the card. I
spun up the drivers cd to see if they included the latest Linux NVIDIA
drivers, version 1.0-2960. Nope not there. But no worries, fire up lynx
(favorite command line browser) and download the latest drivers (version 1.0-2960
at time of writing) from NVIDIA. Installation is
pretty simple. Just be sure to follow the README because you have to hack your
XF86Config file to make some changes.
To help make use of the S-Video port, Albatron has included a 3" S-Video ->
RCA adapter along with a 6' RCA cable to help channel your video from your PC
to your TV.
I am hoping we can take advantage of this S-Video out in a future review.
We have been kicking around the idea of a diskless Linux client that
would run as a video and mp3 server. It would use the web browser
as the front end for file selections and XINE
and XMMS as the video/audio
programs. Yeah Baby!! And small enough to place atop of the
TV set or entertainment center.
Closer Look:
Taking a closer look at the card itself, you can see what I mentioned above
about no DVI port. I had hoped to be displaying the GeForce4 GPU sporting dual
monitors in Linux, but no port = no dual monitors. I did test out the S-Video
port which I'll show later on.
Now how would I be perceived if I did not rip off the GPU cooler
on this card? Probably a chicken sh!$. So off I went with my trusty needle nose
pliers.
It always a nice sign when the manufacture uses thermal compound
between their GPU's and heatsinks and you can see Albatron was no exception
to this un-written rule (or written who knows..). And with a little swipe of
a paper towel and some well placed rubbing alcohol, you can see the GPU.
Just as we had hoped. A GeForce4 MX440 GPU lay hidden behind
that mess of goo. Now turning our attention to the all important memory chips,
you see that they have 64 MB of hynix 4ns memory chips mounted to this card.
Doing our all important math in gnumeric (linux users know what I'm talking about)
(1000 / 4) * 2 = 500 MHz
I was just kidding about gnumeric.
So we should be able to push the default memory speed of 405MHz up to around 500MHz
providing a pretty decent increase in memory speed. We will have to see
if that's possible. One thing to note, I believe in reading some other reviews
of these cards from Albatron that the card came fitted with Samsung 5ns ram. Not
the case with this card. It also important to note that usually when manufactures
are putting together a 64 MB version, they usually pony up some faster memory
to try and make up for the lagging amount of memory. Maybe Albatron caught on
to this.
Details
and Testing -->
