XFX GF4 MX440 - Overview

Overview
The card came in a nice black box with a mean looking bulldog on the box art.  It certainly looks pretty darn spiffy to me.

Included is a cable for the TV Out option, a DVI to VGA converter, a CD for drivers and software, a Cyberlink PowerDVD program, and an instructions manual.

Opening up the box showed that the card was enclosed in a see through hard plastic with no anti-static bag.  It would have been nice to have an anti-static bag but then it would prevent consumers to see the product.  The use of the plastic is good enough for me.

XFX uses a rather large heat sink to cool both the GPU and the BGA ram.  Removing the heat sink revealed that XFX had overclockers in mind.  The use of thermal grease was a good move, however, there was not enough to completely cover the core.  Furthermore, the small BGA ram makes contact with the heat sink through thermal pads.  It certainly isn't the greatest, but it's also not the worst.  I've seen video cards with no thermal interface of any kind included. 

BGA ramchips have now taken over and has been implemented on the Geforce 4 MX440 with AGP 8x support.  Inspecting the ram showed that XFX used Samsung chips that are rated to ran at 3.3ns.  (SORRY FOR THE HORRIBLE PICS...PLEASE BEAR WITH ME...I AM DEFINITELY GETTING MYSELF A BRAND NEW FUJI FINEPIX 3800).  A quick calculation shows that the ram is able to run at DDR 303mhz = 606mhz.  That's pretty darn impressive for a low budget card. 

Here is a shot of the GPU core.

Included Software
There were no included games in the bundle.  I wasn't surprised since this card isn't necessarily aimed at the hardcore gamers out there.  The driver CD, however, was pretty good.  It was packed with the necessary drivers, installation of DX 8.1 and Adobe Acrobat, and drivers for TV capture.  I didn't know what the TV capture was until I tried to install it.  Apparently it's drivers for TV tuner or something.  The card I had didn't have the feature so installing it was of no use.  The driver version for the video card was the Detonator 40.72.  I thought that was pretty good since most of the time companies include much older outdated drivers, these weren't too far behind at the time we received the card.
 

Next: Overclocking, Benchmarks, and Conclusion >>
 

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