VOGONS


First post, by bigern314

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Hello. I picked this up on Ebay to upgrade my PIII-933, AGP 4x based Win98SE system which had a much older ATI Rage card.

I've been reading up on models of this, and the hate it gets, but I'm kind of confused by what Everest is reporting. Its being reported as a MSI MX440SE (MS-8873). 270MHz GPU clock, 128-bit bus with 128MB SDR RAM at 333MHz. Is that memory speed correct? All I'm finding on this is cards with 64MB of DDR at 200MHz on a 64-bit bus.

I'm just going to be using this for older DOS games and WIn98 stuff up to around 2000. Most games past that I'll run on my XP machine so I'm not worried about maxing every bit of performance out of this but just curious about this card and if there is any reason to get a faster one. I see FX5200 but some stuff I'm reading shows it as slower than this card, but other benchmarks show it as faster. Not sure it matters with 2000 and earlier Win98 games.

Reply 1 of 4, by shevalier

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The eight memory chips strongly suggest a 99% probability that there is a 128-bit memory bus.
DDR or SDRAM – well, just Google the chip markings.
DDR or SDRAM – well, just Google the chip markings.
Incidentally, at similar frequencies, memory based on the older standard may not actually be any slower.
In other words, IF both SDRAM and DDR run at 333 MHz, their bandwidth will be the same.
It’s just that 333 MHz is already the limit for SDRAM, whereas for video DDR, it’s only the very beginning of what’s possible.

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/203824829556
If that’s the graphics card you’re looking at, then it’s an excellent choice.

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

Reply 2 of 4, by bigern314

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Good idea. I pulled it from the case and its got 8 K4S281632D-TC60 chips, which are 128-bit, 128MB of SDRAM.

Going off the markings on the card above the heat sink, 8860 Ver 310 its a MX420 but it doesn't have the GeForce4 MX420 on the board anywhere.

But going off the part number sticker, its a MX440 which is what Everest says it is. When I got it off eBay I thought it was the MX420, which has the 166MHz memory clock. So the print on the card, and the stickers along with Everest are conflicting. But I think Everest must be getting the memory clock wrong since this isn't DDR.

Reply 3 of 4, by havli

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If it looks like the ebay one, then it is definitely SDRAM based card. Should be called MX 420 because as far as I know, MX440 is always DDR.

Performance wise MX 420 is among the slowest GeForce4 cards (as the name suggests). Not the worst one as 64-bit MX440s often have 266 MHz memory and therefore are even slower. But proper 128-bit MX440 can easily be 50-100% faster.... depending on the game and settings used. FX 5200 (and FX 5500) is pretty similar to MX440 in raw performance. Not much point in upgrading.

I think for PIII 933 GF4 MX is a solid match.

HW museum.cz - my collection of PC hardware

Reply 4 of 4, by bigern314

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Here is the link https://www.ebay.com/itm/287087761929

The listing was wrong, as it has 8 128-bit memory chips of 16MB for 128MB of memory, and according to the markings its SDR. I didn't think the MX420 came in a 128MB version though. Confusing.

Thanks for the information. Got a lot of free time and want to get this 98 system rocking. This card will be fine I'm sure, anything released after 2002 or so I'd probably be running on my XP system.