It should be fine for anything that supports DX3-7. I used a GF4MX440 on a SFF Dell P4 desktop for 9x gaming and it worked fine.

What's the newest game you're willing to play on that system? That should be the main factor that tells us whether or not a GF4MX440 will suit your needs. For me I used that system only for games that were old enough to not run on XP (i.e. nothing newer than ~2000), anything that runs on XP was played on a more powerful system.

PKFreeZZy wrote:

Long story short, my current graphics card is a TNT2 M64 of an unknown brand and it's really unstable since it crashes whenever it feels like it. I was wondering if I could use a GeForce4 MX440 with version 45.23 nVidia drivers and if it's a card actually worth considering. Any ideas?

The GeForce4 MX is not really a GeForce4, it is a rebranded GeForce2 MX (with faster/wider memory?). The GeForce2 was released in mid-2000, over a year before Windows XP was released, i.e. Windows 98 was the target operating system for the card and it's drivers. So yes, GF2MX/GF4MX are perfect for Win98 and are my cards of choice.

HOWEVER they only come in AGP and some early motherboards have issues with AGP. I.e. some supersocket7s. If you have issues update your bios or get a newer mobo.

There is a significant difference between GeForce2 MX and the GeForce4 MX performance wise, though. The latter, at least the decent MX440 configurations and up, can compete with the GeForce2 Ultra due to improvements to the memory architecture and filtering. Fine up to 2001, but doesn't compete with the DX8 high end. Nice compatibility all around.

I'd say its a good card for older DX titles, but DX8 titles are best enjoyed on XP anyway, it crashes less and DX8 is the start of the XP era

Well I wouldn't run games that are too graphically advanced. The newest game I'd play would be Unreal Tournament GOTY. I just want it to run at at least 50fps (don't know if that's possible on the machine, it has a 350mhz Pentium II). I now have a chance to have 2 PC's on LAN and think it'd be great if I could play with a friend.

Also, my motherboard is an ASUS P2B and the AGP slot is somewhat... loose. I don't know if it's actually the slot though because the card runs fine so long as I don't use animated dropdown menus in nVidia Control Panel and don't play certain 3D games, which fail to recognize the card anyway.

I don't think you can get that framerate with anything less than about a 600-700MHz CPU, unfortunately.

I've read on a couple websites that UT99 requires only 200MHz or so to run properly. The thing is, I'm just getting into the world of computer hardware and learned about bottlenecking and such. Would that MX440 be overkill for my CPU? Like I said earlier, it's a PII @ 350MHz and 100Mhz FSB (whatever that is) and I don't think I'd play any games that came out after 2000.

A Voodoo3 and the proprietary 3dfx Glide render path would give you the most out of that CPU, and it's a great combo for lots of late 90's games.

I run a PCI GeForce4 MX440 on my K6-III-500 system and ran some tests comparing it with a FX5500, GF2, etc. Even with the CPU as the bottleneck, the MX440 came out on top. Re: Best PCI VGA for a K6-III+

Wow, those are some nice results. I guess I'm getting the MX440 then, the AGP revision. I know this post is really dying and that I'm starting to get annoying, but I watched a video about the Radeon 9200 series yesterday and saw its advantages over the GF4. If I bought a Radeon it would be my first time using one of the brand's cards, and I like the idea of its cooling being passive rather than active.

I do recall testing an Radeon 9250 and it was a little faster than the MX440 in Quake III.

Looks like the edit button has been removed. I was going to quickly edit the previous post to say that the benchmark with 9250 was done on a P4 Prescott and not a system with a CPU bottleneck, like the AMD K6-III. In short, I'm not sure if the 9250 is faster than the MX440 on these slower systems.