Chaintech GeForce4 MX440 – (Golden Package)

The first thing that captures your eye as you get hold of the box is the lovely golden color heatsink covering the GPU. Chaintech has even painted the cooling fan gold. It’s a real eye catcher I must admit. First let me tell you what is offered with the card. Along with the card comes a s-video cable for TV-output. Playing a game of NFS5 or ColinMcray’s Rally can give you totally different experience when playing it on your big screen TV.

 

Furthermore Chaintech packs in a nice software bundle as well. So from the moment you get your hands on the card you’re ready to rock. The main CD comes with all the drivers, DirectX 8.1, Intervideo’s WINDVD and 3D Deep. The drivers included are nVidia 27.00 detonator drivers, so you might want to download the latest version from the nVidia site. They also include a copy of MDK 2 and AquaNox as well. I’m not the greatest fans of these genre of games, nevertheless the software bundle is decent by all means.

The card includes four 16MB DDR SDRAM chips, and it’s clocked at 200MHz (DDR). One thing lacking is any kind of memory sinks protecting from heat, however considering this is a MX series we won’t expect them to heat up as much. Since the card we’re reviewing is the Golden sample Chaintech offers, they seem to have applied gold in every possible location. Even the mounting unit has been gold plated; hands down it really looks very cool.

Alright time to see what this card can do. We got hold of a range of cards for this test. One of the 1st GeForce 3 cards, the Visiontek GeForce 3, 3D Prophet II Titanium, Gigabyte GeForce2 MX400, ATI Radeon 8500 and a nVidia GeForce 4 Ti4600. expect some of these reviews shortly as well. All tests were initially done with no overclocking. The Chaintech GeForce4 MX has a clock setting of 270/400MHz standard.