Chaintech 64MB BGA GF4-MX4000 ~ It could be a LOT worse for 44 bucks

Here's an interesting card I bought as a refurb for 37 bucks from newegg this week. It's normally all of 44 dollars.



http://www.newegg.com/app/viewproductdesc.asp?description=14-145-079&DEPA=0

Note the BGA ram. This 64MB card has VGA, TV, and DVI outputs and Hynix 3.3ns BGA ram clocked at 512MHz. The MX4000 GPU is clocked at 275MHz, and makes do with a passive heatsink--rendering the card noisless.

The card can overclock admirably. I found it perfectly mannered clocked as high as 350/700MHz with no additional cooling. And I was really surprised when I ran 3DMark01 to test for stability. The card returned 6338 at the stock 275/512MHz clock rate and exceeded 7300 at 350/700MHz. It cranked out 275fps in Quake3 with my normal 800x600 settings. With attention to cooling, I'm sure 375/750MHz clocks are viable.

I bought this for my secondary computer, a media PC of sorts. It has a TV tuner card, [email protected] on a P4PE, and now a new video card to allow it to perform its capture and playback duties. The TV output and video playback of this card is flawless, making it an ideal addition due to the low cost, reasonable 3D, great 2D and TV out, and zero noise. The DVI may come in handy someday as well. If you don't need advanced game performance this is a really nice card.

*Note* The typical cheapie MX4000s don't use BGA ram and are a lot slower. I don't know exactly how wide the memory bus is on this card but the performance is as good as any of the GF4MX family, where these 64bit TSOP ram equipped MX4000s are much slower (GF2-MX400 type slow).

larva said:

*Note* The typical cheapie MX4000s don't use BGA ram and are a lot slower. I don't know exactly how wide the memory bus is on this card but the performance is as good as any of the GF4MX family, where these 64bit TSOP ram equipped MX4000s are much slower (GF2-MX400 type slow).

Click to expand...

You can find out the memory bandwith on Riva tuner.That was a pretty nice find for what your using it for.You got about the same score as my MX440 so It's probably 128bit.

Good tip; I figured it out by using my eyes. The Chaintech box has a sticker that finalized the exact specification for this card (which appears to be the only way you find out...). There is different, and all erroneous, information on newegg's site, chaintech's site, and in the user's guide that accompanies the card.. lol.

It's 128bit memory, as evidenced by the 7400 3DMark. This is much like the old GF4MX-460, a little-seen variant with 128bit BGA ram that would do some clock. While not a terribly exciting product at the ~$200 a MX460 was expected to command in its day, I like the card immensely for ~$40.