Geforce4 MX440-SE, how to tell if it's 64 or 128 bit memory bus

I just picked up an MSI Geforce4 MX440SE-T for an older box of mine. According to the MSI site, this card has 5.3 GB/sec of memory bandwidth, meaning that it's clocked at 166MHz DDR, with a 128 bit memory bus.

I opened up the box and took a quick look at the manual. It is exactly the same as the manual on the website, however, it instead reads 2.7GB/sec of memory bandwidth, meaning that it on has a 64 bit memory bus!

I have not yet removed the card from the static bag. Does anyone know how I can tell what kind of memory bus this card has? It has four Samsung memory chips, rated at 5ns. On them it reads "k4d28163hd-tc50".

Methinks it's actually 166mhz SDRAM on a 128-bit bus. MX440SEs use SDRAM.

Nah, it's DDR all right. I found the data sheets for those memory chips and it looks as if they're 16 bits each, so the four of them together make for a total of only 64 bits. This despite the fact that the MSI site states that it has a 128 bit memory bus.

I heard of people complaining about ATI's lack of standardization and control when it comes to third party manufacturers, but I didn't realize that Nvidia may even be worse when it comes to this.

Captain Hilts said:

Nah, it's DDR all right. I found the data sheets for those memory chips and it looks as if they're 16 bits each, so the four of them together make for a total of only 64 bits. This despite the fact that the MSI site states that it has a 128 bit memory bus.

I heard of people complaining about ATI's lack of standardization and control when it comes to third party manufacturers, but I didn't realize that Nvidia may even be worse when it comes to this.

Click to expand...

I am willing to bet that MSI is stating that the card has a 128bit bus by saying that 64bit DDR = 128bit. What they forget to tell you is that the 128bit bus is the SDR equivalent.

Well here's the link to the page:

http://www.msi.com.tw/program/products/vga/vga/pro_vga_detail.php?UID=374&MODEL=MS-8878

Notice that for the MX 440 SE it says 5.3GB/s of memory bandwidth. The memory is clocked at 166MHz, so to arrive at 5.3GB/s either the memory bus is 128 bits and the memory is DDR so 166 x 128/8 x 2 = 5.3GB/s, or the memory bus is 256 bits and it's SDR.

It's obviously not the latter so they are stating that it's 128 bit DDR.