VOGONS


First post, by jcfb

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So, I was testing this geforce4 mx on my pentium 3 system and I quickly noticed that the vram amount was only showing as 32MB.

At first I thought it was some issue with the AGP aperture, but changing that made no difference whatsoever.

That's when I went looking for the datasheet of the vram chips and noticed they were only 8MB in size.
Each of the 4 chips on the card has a 32bit memory interface, effectively making it a 128bit card as confirmed by aida64 and hwinfo.

I can't find any info on this card online whatsoever and I haven't found anyone else that has a card with this memory configuration.
Weirdly enough the boot splash and the sticker on the back say it is a 64MB card so whoever made this card didn't even bother changing that.

I know there are other geforce4 mx with 32MB of vram but all of them seem to have a 64bit bus instead of a 128bit bus, so my question is, has anyone else here ever seen another mx440 like this one?

XP PC: Gigabyte GA-X38-DQ6, C2D E8400, HD 5750 1GB, SB X-Fi XtremeMusic SB0460
ME PC: Asrock 775i65g R2.0, Pentium E2200, Radeon 9600XT, SB Audigy ES

Reply 1 of 2, by shevalier

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It’s just a generic Chinese card; that sort of thing happened all the time back then.
The NVIDIA BIOS from that era automatically detects the amount and configuration of the memory, so it was simply tweaked to report 64 MB.
Here are some screenshots from eBay showing cards with the same chips and 64 MB of memory.
https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/fCEAAeSwBrppal7E/s-l1600.jpg
https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/-pYAAeSwwkZpal7E/s-l1600.jpg
or
https://www2.vgamuseum.info/images/zaatharen/ … a/mx440_fhq.jpg
https://www2.vgamuseum.info/images/zaatharen/ … a/mx440_bhq.jpg

The MX440 with 4 chips and a 128-bit bus with 64 MB did exist, but the memory in that model is completely different.
https://www2.vgamuseum.info/index.php/home/it … geforce4-mx-440

https://www2.vgamuseum.info/images/vlask/nvidia/wfa170fb.jpg
https://www2.vgamuseum.info/images/vlask/nvid … a/wfa170fzb.jpg
https://www2.vgamuseum.info/images/vlask/nvidia/wfa170.png

Aopen MX3S, PIII-S Tualatin 1133, Radeon 9800Pro@XT BIOS, Audigy 4 SB0610
JetWay K8T8AS, Athlon DH-E6 3000+, Radeon HD2600Pro AGP, Audigy 2 Value SB0400
Gigabyte Ga-k8n51gmf, Turion64 ML-30@2.2GHz , Radeon X800GTO PL16, Diamond monster sound MX300