One of Nvidia's most Controversial GPU
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- Опубликовано: 24 июл 2024
- The Nvidia GeForce4 MX misled many gamers, when it was actually based on GeForce2 technology and slower than GeForce3. But what about retro gaming with Windows 98?
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0:00 Introduction
1:06 GeForce4 MX is based on GeForce2
2:04 Avoid 420 and SE
2:24 Look for 128 Bit
2:43 460 is best
2:56 Asus MX 460
3:39 Retro PC parts
4:56 Software and settings
5:49 Benchmarks
6:33 Tachyon: The Fringe
8:56 Max Payne
10:35 Screamer 4x4
11:24 Total Annihilation
12:14 Summary and thoughts 
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Like! I remember back in 2002-2003 many of my friends and colleagues became proud owners of new Geforce 4 cards... but not knowing the difference between the MX and TI series, they practically all of course purchased the cheaper MX ones, which where nothing else than higher clocked Geforce 2's. I remember two of my friends somehow even managed to purchase 32-bit memory GF 4 MX's, yes 32-bit, not even 64-bit ones. I was the one they called when they had problems with the PC and even today I remember what configuration they had :))
I did not know they made 32 bit cards, that is so Jensen. It needs to be benched!!!
@@supabass4003 the 32-bit GF 4 MX is probably a little slower than a 128-bit Geforce 2 MX but faster than the 64-bit Geforce 2 MX200.
Especially the MX 4000 card series does have 32-bit models.
That's why I got my MX440 for free from an angry person who bought it and then said it's shit and wanted to throw it out of window. The same thing happened to my father with FX5200, he also got it for free from a friend who switched to FX5700.
The 64MB, 32b version manufactured by XFX was super common in my country (Argentina) :(
Fantastic video. This was a real treat because just last week I was telling my dear friend about the whole Geforce4 MX series debacle and how some poor bastards who thought they were finally obtaining a real Geforce 4 wound up with something more like a nerfed Geforce 2! Our first modern PC was an Athlon Thunderbird 1.2ghz 256mb RAM with a Geforce 2 in 2001 that my brother got, forgot what the occasion was. That was an epic computer which was upgraded to a Geforce 4 Ti4200 and 512mb RAM. Morrowwind no longer crashed with the extra RAM. Before the upgrade remember playing and completing Max Payne on the Geforce 2 in October 2001. I remember in the early 2000s guiding a coworker's roommate over the phone through a spot in Max Payne he was stuck in and didn't know how to proceed.
Geforce4 MX.....
In 2006, a coworker at different job gave me a Dell Optiplex clamshell style tower that would not power on. After replacing the power supply it came to life and I used that as a daily rig for 9 years until 2015! It had a P4 2.26ghz, Soundblaster Live, 512mb RAM, and a Geforce4 MX--(cannot remember if it was a 400 or a 440). I watched a lot of youtube videos on that Dell with the Geforce4 MX full screen on a 55 inch LCD TV at 360p. I used the Geforce 4 MX for 2 solid years until I bought a FX5200 256mb variant card off ebay and with the FX5200 I could finally watch 480p videos at full screen on the 55 inch LCD. The Geforce4 MX was unable to provide viewing of the 480p videos at full screen and I never understood why and now I wonder if I had the lowest quality variant. The Dell still works great and I do have the Geforce4 MX somewhere in the house. (sorry if long winded but I can chat about these hardware related memories all day)
I do have a higher appreciation of the Geforce4 MX cards after this video. Thank you for uploading this informative video.
Thank you so much for sharing ☺️
This card on the other hand had a really good T&L engine to "compensate for the lack of DX8", at a point it was a viable card for CAD stuff. which made it hurt the quadro sales.
Iirc the hardware t&l was pretty much why I got it! It was fast becoming a necessity
@@TheTurnipKing You probably got a lot of it.
@@dan_loup IIRC, I needed it for the likes of Dungeon Siege & Neverwinter Nights circa 2002. Games like these were just starting to demand the presence of hardware T&L.
Dont forget Battlefield 1942!
I didn't even realise I was scammed till now lol :) I just thought it was a a really cut down Geforce 4. I was a poor student at the time, and didn't want to stretch it for the full power GF4. In any case the game we played 90% of the time was Counterstrike with which this card got decent frames on. Thanks for the great content Phil, I discovered your channel recently and you have inspired me to setup a windows 98SE box with some older hardware I have managed to scrape together (sound cards are hard to come by though). The resources on your website have also been super helpful, love your work!
Welcome to this amazing hobby 😊
The 440 MX 128 has been in my Win98/2K PC for years and I absolutely love it for 90s accelerated games.
I had one back then and loved it. I eventually traded it to someone on yahoo groups for a Sega CDX with 37 games. I still have that console so in the long run it was a win. I only traded it because my brother in law gave me his MSI Geforce4 4200ti 64mb. That was a major upgrade for me at the time. Unreal Tournament 99 and Counter-Strike were my go to games back then. Still have it in a AMD Duron system but the fan died. Maybe I'll order a replacement this weekend. Much love my guy. Hope you have a wonderful weekend =)
Hi mate, I remember "Geforce 4 MX440 64MB DDR AGP 8X" was the first dedicated video card I ever had, it cost me 30US and I was amazed at its performance (compared to the introducted video "S3 Pro Savage DDR"). Months after I changed it for a Radeon 9200SE 64MB (45US) and there I realized that despite being certainly slower the image quality I had with the Radeon was much better. From that moment I became more studious and began to find out about what it was and the levels of "Shader Model" and "DirectX" supported by Hardware on video cards, greetings!
Thanks for sharing!
Time for another night of Phil's Computer Lab
Had one of these when I was a kid, felt so scammed by that Geforce 4 Mx 440
i had 440 se 128mb lmfao slooow
the FX garbage made me boycott nvidia .. and to this day if its nvidia it better be free cuz i aint paying for their garbage.
I love seeing how these cards work with older games. While they may not have been desirable when released, they make for great, affordable solutions for Windows '98 era games. Thanks for putting this one through its paces!
In Half Life 2 there was a plastic bag instead of water (with MX).
For Max Payne,
- go into settings and rebind the controls for Bullet Time and Shoot Dodge to 2 separate buttons. They're set to Right Click/Shift by default, and its not a great way to play the game.
- For health, open cabinets and everything to add painkillers. Use painkillers with TAB key.
One of the best video games ever made, and my childhood favorite.
Thanks for the tips?
As a child the MSI Geforce 4MX 420 was my third graphics card (Voodoo 1 4MB, NVIDIA Riva TNT2 M64 16MB).
It was a huge upgrade compared to the previous graphics card. I had the 64bit version, I learned that later. It was however a overclock monster, I could max the sliders. That helped quite a lot. I can't exactly remember what the last game (Mafia, BF1942?) that I played with the 4 MX but when the DirectX 8 games arrived it was clear that the party was over for that graphics card... After 1,5 year I upgraded again to a GeForce4 Ti 4200.
Ti 4200 was epic, one of Nvidia's best GPUs IMO.
I'd say that TNT2 M64 was their first "not what it sounds like" type of a card. And yeah Phil, the MX 420 is the SDR version you mentioned.
The first computer I bought with my own money (and our first with 3D acceleration) had a 32MB TNT2 M64. I was so disappointed by it... :(
@@Ale.K7 Why were you disappointed with it? The M64 was a very capable budget card for the time. The only real deficiencies it had were in 32 bit color or high resolutions, which were held back by the 64 bit memory bus. 32 bit color at the time in games was still a new thing and commanded a premium to render at that quality level with acceptable performance.
Likely because TNT2 M64 was still used for budget PCs as a socket filler as late as geforce 2 by OEMs. It wasn’t until geforce 2 mx they stopped shipping TNT2 M64. A TNT2 M64 in 1999 was perfectly acceptable. One resolution lower than M64 pro you got the same framerate; so e.g. 800x600 instead 1024x768.
TNT2 pro; not M64 pro. 😜
@@soylentgreenb But a normal consumer didn't know what that M64 meant. Normal consumer was most likely "OH BOY, A TNT2!" or something but the reality was bad. :/
First card I ever purchased. As a kid I couldn’t figure out why it didn’t run games well or had weird glitches. I felt so scammed! (Still dislike Nvidia)
I loved to read the bookled from my MSI version and comparing all the geforces in it that they made. The different megaflop numbers the ram bitrates and many input/output conection configs.
I almost bought one because I'm not a hardcore gamer and just wanted to upgrade to something halfway decent. luckily a good friend was really into gaming and went like OMG NO when I told him about my plan. Went with a Ti 4200 instead after his recommendation, and was really happy with it for a couple years. Eventually upgraded to an 8800GTS
I viscerally hate Nvidia :)
@@chunye215 my dad had the GeForce 4 Ti4200 and it ran battlefield 1942 great, so I figured I’ll save up and get my own GeForce 4. Back then I couldn’t figure out why things looked so wrong on the MX440. Well, now I know it’s because it couldn’t really do shaders. I wanted to play Halo CE but it’s literally couldn’t render Master Chief. There were so many missing objects in so many newer (at the time) games.
First card I ever bought as well. But I was lucky: I didn't really know much about graphics cards, I just needed it to work better than the objectively awful i810 integrated graphics (and be PCI because i810) in my old hand-me-down PC. Which it did effortlessly.
I had an MX 440, and I probably used it to play Tachyon: The Fringe 😊
Max Payne is pretty gruelling, but the story is great. Worth perservering!
Will do 😊
I used this in my Pentium 3 PC when my Voodoo 3 card went down. It was awesome. Worked great for all the 98 games, even Serious Sam worked good. I always recommend this card (the 440) to people who are building Win 98 machines to play games from the late 90's and don't want to break the bank on a vintage GPU. It really does work great!
You are right, it is a solid GPU for Windows 98! I guess also works well with DOS.
@@philscomputerlab There was a very useful chart on Vogons for DOS compatability of PCI and AGP graphics cards, but it seems the link doesn't work now (or I couldn't find the right one). In general, as far as I can remember nVIDIA, s3 and 3DFX Voodoo 3/4/5 were good for DOS, ATI and Matrox weren't as good.
Ah yes I remember that one. He had a few games that are picky like Commander Keen and other games that use weird resolutions. I think the MX will do pretty good for DOS, better than Radeon.
With the use of dgvoodoo (not dgvoodoo2, the first!) and its DX7 mode, you can even use the Geforce4 MX for glide games btw, very versatile.
@@kosmosyche I did notice that Redneck rampage did crash when I tried to play that game in DOS with the mx 440. But for the most part it was good.
Great video as always. Would love to see more retro parts for sure. Maybe testing more agp gpu's
We had one of these - a 440SE as part of a new P4 system, being an upgrade from a 233MHz Cyrix and a Voodoo 4500. Even knowning it wasn't the best even in the budget realm, it's kinda all we could afford and it did pretty damn admirably. I remember having to use a utility to fake having proper DX9c compliance for Silent Hill 3 (which worked fine) and Pariah (which had giant white cubes everywhere where shaders were meant to be) and I then replaced it with the unholy itsef, the FX5200. Fun memories!
Happy Friday Phil! Thanks for covering this card 👍
Think the first graphics card i ever bought off the shelf was geforce 2mx 32mb, it was SPARKLE branded, from my local shopping center in stoke-on-trent way back in 2000, it worked well with my pentium III 866Mhz cpu on a QDI legend motherboard, running windows 98, i have fond memories of it actually, it played games pretty well.
Max payne you need to look in any cupboards you find for ammo and painkillers.
Hey Phil, nice to see your Samsung monitor running in 4:3 mode! I recently switched to a 16:10 monitor after my 1600x1200 sadly died (good thing it was cheap). Your thread on Vogons about 4:3 friendly widescreens was super helpful for this! I ended out getting a Dell P2423 - 1920x1200, VGA and DVI inputs, and 4:3 mode (it even has a 5:4 mode, but no 1:1 pixel mapping). Super stoked to find a new monitor with all those features, and it seems to handle DOS resolutions fine (some frame skipping I think). Thought you might be interested to know that there are still some new monitors being made that are retro friendly.
Beautiful with IPS panel!
As a kid in 2005, I purchased Geforce4 MX440 to play GTA San Andreas, I played it on 800x600, it did what i needed at the time and used it for 2 years before moving to a more modern gpu.
You could find white box cards for this series starting at $69 back then . I really miss those cards lol . I have the MX460 for a semperon build
I remember the ruckus this card brought forth back then, great video as usual!
11:25 - TA is an absolute classic, one of my favorite RTS games.
Hi Phil ! i downloaded the drivers for the sound blaster live from your website and they are great i just posted a new video on my channel using a basic driver for the board and they work fine but are not complete. thanks for the information !
Here in Brazil there was a model called gf4 mx4000 who had 32 bit interface. Painfully slow, but sold like hot cakes.
OMG 32 Bit 🤦♂️
@@philscomputerlab Yes this is news to me, I'd love to see how it performs. Well love isnt the right word but you know what I mean!
@@philscomputerlab Yeah. My brother had one. It was awful. Something like 2k points in 3dmark2001.
Same in Argentina. 64MB, 32b MX4000s by XFX were EVERYWHERE! :(
lol, you would've been better with a Geforce mx200 than that card.
Still have my pci bridged mx440. At the time I only had pci slots so there's wasn't much of an option.
Last year I also bought by accident an mx460 agp. Now I can really see how much slower the fx5200 is
Awesome video! Love the wide variety of games tested 👍
Glad you enjoyed!
Thanks for the nice video as usual
Thank you for watching so loyal 😊
I got my MX 440 on ebay for 10 dollars, it came out of a Dell. It works great for Windows 98 / late DOS gaming.
Great content! Did not know my neigbours in Finland made the first Max Payne game. Some good gaming history. Love the Max Payne games. I have a mx440 also but i think it is the 64bit version extremely slow. Made a mistake in getting a 64bit 9550 radeon thinking i would re create my first pc but the 64bit version is also running slow. Managed to get a radeon 9600 pro 128bit for 5 euros and that is a way better card. Guess i did not have a good eye for fps back then haha.
It looks like a marketing gimmick now, but I think we are forgetting how fast things moved back then. GeForce2 came out in 2000, GF4MX in early 2002. I remember getting a prebuilt with a GF4MX not even a year after my friend bought a stand alone GF2. Back then, I was happy to get similar performance for much less.
They were quite popular in Brazil. Happy to say I was able to get a r9550 128/128 after a couple of years and didn't need to use 3danalyzer anymore.
I watched a lot of hardware creators on RUclips. It is very boring to see the exact same game save file over and over so thanks Phil. Keep your save so we don't see the same images over and over again. Great idea!
Wow, thanks!
Very nice video! I'd like to see maybe a little more exploration of PCI graphics and comparing the experience to the early AGP. So many boards had only PCI and can be found really cheap, so it might be fun to see what you can build.
I hear you, but seeing PCI card prices, I feel it's more beneficial to swap out the board for one with AGP.
Back then, i am really glad i skipped the gf4 mx series. When my ti200 died, after a rather legendary overclocking run, i had pooled together everything i could to make the most of what i needed to go to a Ti4200-8x. At that point in time, it was a choice of either faster clocked 64mb or slower 128mb of memory. I must have lucked out; my asus ti4200-8x was the 128mb variant and overclocked to the faster spec without even trying. 😮
I want to cover the 4200 for sure, IMO one of the best value cards from Nvidia, with 8800 GT and 6600 GT.
Yep, that was the secret of the Ti 4200, the 128 MB version was slower! IIRC, the VRAM sucked on the 128 MB version.
@@RJARRRPCGP Which makes the overclock I was able to do, all the more surprising. Specs wise, there was no way the memory should have matched the faster clock of the 64mb version; yet it did. Granted, the games I was playing at the time were nowhere near as demanding, so it probably got away with a lot more. 😅
While some of the PR might have been misleading for non technical people, they made 3D gaming viable for many many people, myself included. Sure, they all had shortcomings, but the sheer fact that you could actually RUN things more than made up for it. TNT2 M64, GF2 MX, GF4 MX, GF4 4200Ti, 6600LE, 7600GS, 8600GS, 9600GS, etc, none were meant to be "all that great" only "budget friendly, good enough, works". Also good to remember that these days IGP's/APU's fill that "budget spot", but anyone old enough to remember i810 will giggle a bit. Had it not been for those "cheappo cut-down and feature deprived" GPU's the 3D gaming industry would have found a LOT LESS purchase than it did.
Back in the day I was waaaay into the PlayStation 2 and its games, so the Geforce MX series passed me by. Nowadays, I got a Pentium 4 with a Geforce MX 4000 and 1 GB of RAM. This system was given to me as a gift by a friend that had it collecting dust in a corner. She heard I'm into retro PC and retrogaming in general and gave me the system (CRT monitor and everything!). I experimented with a few games on Windows 98 and XP before the system eventually gave up the ghost due to poor capacitors on the motherboard and weird sounds coming from the PSU.
Because of one of Phil's videos, I ended up building a Windows XP machine with a 4th gen Core i3, 4 GB of RAM and a Geforce GTX 650. If memory serves, this is the last of the Intel Core series that supports XP. Anyway, the machine handles all the WinXP games I throw at it like a champ and is new enough to have a safe motherboard and PSU. I still use the case and peripherals from the P4 system I inherited, so it looks period-appropriate.
Awesome! The GeForce 600 series is a good pick and that machine will run so many many games really well :D
I thought all low profile AGP cards with four memory chips (two on front, two on back) were 64-bit memory bus. You proved me wrong Phil!
Just one tiny correction: there ARE actually MX 4000s with 128bit memory bandwidth. You can tell which one it is by where the RAM chips are located: if they form a straight line, it's 64 bit at most. If they form an L, it's 128 bit.
So confusing 😂 Thanks!
I recebtly bought a very cheap MX4000 with just 32bit memory bus out of curiosity 🙂 And it was better than expected - as long as you stay with 640x480 resolution.
@@philscomputerlabdoesn’t help that as recently as a few years ago you could but NOS MX 4000s on eBay… with just photos of the box
I've yet to bench it, but I recently purchased 2 3D Fuzion (BFGtech) *PCI* cards with matching PCBs. The strange part: one is a MX 4000 128-bit 128MB and the other a FX 5500 128-bit 256MB.
mx4000 came later with fx series.
I worked at a small photography store and our primary NT4 workstation used integrated graphics. It was unbearable just for selecting photos in the Kodak software to send to our Noritsu printer. I got so fed up, I bought the cheapest discrete card I could, a GeForce4 MX400 for $25. I wasn't expecting much from the upgrade since the CPU was the same, but just putting in the video card made that workstation absolutely fly! Photos loaded a good 6-8 times faster.
Ah, everything was better than integrated graphics back then. 8)
I was just eyeing a similar cards for myself and wondered what are the differences. Would be interesting to compare it against Geforce 2 MX 400. And regarding to Total Annihilation, you probably already discovered this but for everyone else trying out the game, you can set patrol routes by queuing patrol command, creating an infinite loop, very useful for air fighters defending the base! And also when construction planes are set patrol above your base, they will automatically assist and repair any units on the ground, quite useful as well.
Geforce 4 mx440 is more than double the performance of mx400 in Q3 Arena. Think of mx400 as a GeForce 256, while mx440 had certain advantages over most of the Geforce2 models (Ti, Pro, GTS). Hence the difference. But that was only the case if you had a 128bit card.
I remember using a GeForce 256, GeForce 2 MX and GeForce Ti4400 back in the day and loved my gaming experiences on all of them! I ditched the FX 5000 series due to numerous issues and cheating Nvidia software altering resolutions to increase benchmark scores and went with ATI for a few generations.
I recommended this GPU back then when my friends and I played a lot of Diablo II, Starcraft and Counter-Strike. The low power requirements and passive cooling means my friend's parents could just order it up as an inexpensive option on many base model Dells/Gateways making for a great cheap gaming machine.
I believe back in the days I've switched from a S3 Savage4 to a GeForce4 MX440, and the speed difference was night and day. I've only had an Inno3D card with a very crappy cooler which I had to swap eventually. But otherwise I really liked that card.
6:40 That's a name I haven't heard in a while. I loved the Delta Force series and Joint Operations Typhoon Rising!
I had the 440MX sold it and got my AOpen Aleous GeForce4 4200Ti 128MB Ram it’s was a beast back then. I would love to see you building an awesome Windows 98 PC with that card🤩🤩
It was pretty crazy to see that these cards were in every way inferior to my Geforce 2 Ti in game benchmarks.
I ran that card for so long the pcb is discolored from the heat, great value at the time if you knew what you had (Very fast geforce 2). Never had real performance issues but the lack of DX8/9 showed and I was jealous of my friend's real Geforce 4 Ti. Now for a retro machine this is a great cheap Geforce 2 choice
Can't beat a Friday morning with Phil! Tachyon looks gorgeous, gonna have to swing by gog again...
It really is a great game 🙂
Agreed about the 45.23 drivers. Although it'll take later versions, I remember having issues with them.
Agrred. Love my MX440 because of passiv cooling and DVI support. Also usable in older AGP2x and more modern 4x rigs. Very versatile.
The 'GeForce4 MX 440' was my first GPU!
My first computer was given to me in 2001 by a friend of my dad's who worked at a software dev company with parts they had lying around - Pentium III 933Mhz - 512MB Ram - ATi Rage 8MB
When CS1.6 got popular a friend of mine gave me a MX 440 he had spare and it was night and day!
Oh my going from a Rage to GeForce4 MX, what an upgrade!
@@philscomputerlab sadly died some time after cause one time I moved the case with the PC on and turns out the card wasn't seated properly in the slot 😅 just stopped working.. My mate must've had a secret PC shop cause he had a GeForce 4 4400ti I think it was? Or was it a 4800 I can't remember.. Stuck with that card for so many years after that 😋
The ATI Rage would've been a pretty old, weak card even at the time. They must've carried it over from an older system.
@@chemergency Oh yeah defo! I mean.. we had dialup until like.. 2003? I didn't really use the PC much in those days.. mostly played PS2 😂 It was only when we got 256kbps and then right after ADSL that I started using the PC more often
MX 440 from Gainward was my "upgrade gpu" from TNT m64. Wanted to get BGA memory version to do some overclocking and get some extra performance for free.
It was a nice jump in performance anyway.
The early 128bit SDRAM MX420 cards are in-between the 64bit and 128bit DDR cards in terms of performance. Stay away from the 32bit cards.
I've seen heaps of these in prebuilts over the years. It meant they could stick "Geforce4 MX" on the advertising, despite how close in performance it was to the older Geforce 2. Looked like an upgrade to most people, and was cheaper for the oems
Yes, most of computer shops forget putting MX in invoice. My shock when all sites told this can run Sims 2, but my don't.
Thank you very much for you videos, your hard work and so much informations. I'm glad to see the good old hardware in work again. :)
Time is so fast running, now i'm 40 and i miss the good old times with AMD K6/Athlon/Pentium 2/3. It was a good time.
Do you have a Video, where you compare SD-RAM against DDR-RAM?
Maybe PC133 SD vs PC 266 DDR?
Sorry for my little bit bad english. I hope, its understandable. Greetings and all time good to you. :)
Greetings from "down under" of the bavarian forest / Germany
Thanks for the comment! Comparing SD with DDR is tricky because you want to have all other aspects identical, so there are some motherboards that support both standards, or you can choose similar boards, like with the Pentium 4. The Athlon XP also saw SD and later DDR. For sure something we can check out in a future video!
@@philscomputerlab Thank you for your reply :)
You don't have to do any work now because of me. You certainly have a lot of work. If you decide to make a video about it, I'm looking forward to it. I am currently testing an ASUS A7V333 and would like to buy an ASUS A7V133. With the same CPU and PC133 SDRAM and PC266 DDR RAM, a comparison should be possible, though not accurate. I think I even have the old PC Games Hardware magazines from the 2000s here. I seem to remember that back then they had such
tests back then.
Good afternoon Phil
I used to have the Nvidia GeForce MX/MX400 in both 64 megabytes of RAM and 128 MB I got that one at TigerDirect many many many years and both surprisingly enough each was 256-bit bus 8X AGP
GF4 MX is pretty damn good card for late 90s-2000ish Win98 gaming on a modest platform. I have slot1 P3 800MHz + Voodoo 2 system for exactly that and I had GF2 GTS in it, which decided to give up the ghost. I tested couple options I had inmy parts bin for a replacement, and decided to go with passive Gainward 440MX as it was better option than FX5600 for this application. That really shows how much FX series actually sucked, and I have been happily running that Gainward since and haven’t bothered to look for other options.
Personally I would go with something that can do at least DX8.1, just to have that range. DX9 stuff will do pretty much perfect under XP, but 8 and 8.1 sit in that gap
I had buiit an AMD duron 900 and this vídeo card. I felt I could now enjoy previous 3d games but at the same time, the new ones already proved these were cheap tech. But was heaps better than onboard carda I was used to. It was good while it lasted. Great video.
Right around 2006-07, I somehow acquired an MX 440 (Which I still have to this day, I need to make sure it still works!) from a then discarded PC. Even back then its performance was respectable in Windows 98se and a Slot 1 Pentium 2. That card later got reused in a Pentium 3 866mhz machine as a primary display device. I'm a hoarder, so I eventually tucked that card away alongside the FX5700 LE.
Loved playing Screamer 4x4 back in the day. I spent all day waiting for the demo to download over Dial Up haha. Yes you can win upgrades for your car, but you have to drive fast to beat the fastest time. It's not easy! I found adjusting tires and suspension helped to get over tricky tracks and getting a fast time in
Yea I'll try a few more times but might just give up on it 😕
@@philscomputerlab It seems to take no prisoners! A game controller helped me as I've usually stuck with a keyboard
I remember one time at a lan party and my ancient geforce 2 gts ran circles around these things in counter strike 1.4
Imagine buying this card back in 2003/2004 and trying to play any game that required pixel shader support in it
Dodging the 64bit cards on eBay is quite difficult because both the "MX440 8X AGP" and the "MX440 SE" can come with a 64bit memory buses. I think if they have 8 memory chips it is 128bit bus? And the SE is slower than the non SE. But sellers rarely provide that information and sometimes the label on the back of the card doesn't either!
Thanks for cover this card, has an old model GF2-MX4-64M on my shelf. Games in video mostly from 2000s, but I plan a retro-build: SLOT1 Pentium III-450Mhz, GF2 and Aueral Vortex 2 - mostly for DOS games and some 90's stuff, under Win98SE. So the quick question is - how this cards are compatible with old DOS games and some games using DirectX 7.0? :)
For DOS it will work great, but 450 MHz under Windows means stick with older games and stay away from games 1998 - 2000.
I still own a box copy of Tachyon the Fringe. I remember buying it because it was voiced by Bruce Cambell.
What thermal pad are you using? Looks like it's just a sheet that doesn't even get sticky. Seems quite useful for experimenting with different coolers and CPUs
Check my video on IC Graphite!
I love Tachyon: The Fringe so much. Spent many hours playing it back in the day. Same with Max Payne haha.
The problem with Geforce 4 MX series is that lack of pixel shaders and it hurt badly where in comparison every single radeon 9000 series card(even the budget ones) had support for shader 1.4 at least and this was a problem when you wanted to play some games like battlefield 2 which had min spec of shader 1.1. Then we have a complete lack of MVertices/s or actual Support for direct3d 8.0 because all the of the 4 MX cards were in reality direct3d 7.0 which lead to some hilarious instances where even when pixel shaders were not required the card were totally crippled. Also the most common variants were mx440 and mx420 in AGP x4 configuration so their direct competition was the weakest card of 9000 series the freaking radeon 9200 SE 64 bit. The mx460 was actually quite rare because of the price tag basically back then if i remember correctly could get you GeForce3 Ti200, Radeon 9100 or Geforce 4 Ti4200 which ment that that card was pointless hell i even remember times when the price point of some manufacturers was so high on these failure of the cards that they asked you price of radeon 9500.
The people forget that the 2000's were a complete shit!@#! in terms of optimization for specific hardware and the biggest comedy was when games that had Nvidia logo on it usually run the worst on nvidia cards which drivers were just as bad as Radeon drivers this circus continued until the freaking 8000 series came but even then you had the anomaly like need for speed undercover where high spec nvidia card run worse than amd low end card.
Can't tell you how happy I am to see you back in the old rotation (can't hear Linus of LTT say "No such thing as a bad product, only a bad price" without thinking of you).
No shade intended, but would love a redo of the GOG video (it is a little hard to follow with the orchestral music loudness vs dialog volume)
Also, another socket 775 Win98 fx 5500 pci video with overclocking. I know there were some settings issues that kept it out of the last video.
Maybe a SFF (intel T processor or earlier generation SFF) with a M.2 PCIE adapter for GPU on XP with a USB CD-rom. ( RUclipsr nowaynick did a great video using Win 10)
A bifurcation pci/pci-e card video.
I've got a ton of other ideas for xp and 7 compatible gpu features that have zero coverage except promos at the time (cost prohibitive for most consumers back then), I'll be happy to share.
Thanks for the suggestions! For sure, can do a GOG video. Do you mean the one with 98 games?
Yep, that's the one!
@@ashleyjwilliamshand Okie no worries 🙂
@@philscomputerlab Almost forgot! I've noticed youtube systematically downwngrades some older videos to 240p and 440p options only. Haven't seen it happen on any of your videos, but as aggressive as youtube has been, it's only a matter of time.
Would happily buy a DVD or blue ray box set with your uploads. Different volumes or operating system specific disc's. A commentary soundtrack where you can discuss the advancements made or info learned since that video. Comics do hardcove volumes and collected editions all the time, then a final omnibus.
I'd pay!
Speaking of GeForce 4 MX, I remember when I used to have a laptop that a family member had bought, that had a GeForce 4 MX. When I used Linux on it, the only thing the NVIDIA binary driver could do was crash the X server. And each Xorg major version upgrade, NVIDIA updated the driver to crash the next version of the X server.
interesting, what was the model of the laptop and in what year did you buy it?
Ooh, I love Max Payne! The secret to success is using bullet time dodge move pretty much all throughout the combat - shooting enemies will recharge your bullet time meter and when you do it properly you can almost use it indefinitely.
Ahh, so it recharges, well I didn't know that and I did play the tutorial carefully 😂🤦♂️
My first experience with the GeForce4 MX was not discrete, but on the nForce2 chipset IGP. It was by no means stellar for then-current games. But as onboard video? It didn't get any better than this. It played older titles extremely well. Lack of DX8 and shader support was not a big issue for a while.
safe to say that the nforce 2 integrated geforce 4mx wasn't matching the AGP card's performance.
@@mirific87 I believe it. Max Payne seems better performing on Phil's video than I remember from that IGP.
Back When I built my AthlonXp rig, I skipped the geforce4 gen and went to a radeon 9600pro. Ati seemed to be a better bang for the buck.
Video suggestions:
ISA sound cards for DOS gaming guide. What works well and what doesn't. What compatibility is needed (adlib/SB/SBpro/adpcm) with and without Midi.
Pull out the yamaha/ess/Soundblaster.
I have a GF4 MX in a laptop. Newest drivers that were supporting GF4 MX series didn't work. Had to install some beta drivers, otherwise Silent Hill2 wouldn't run properly. I also have GF4 MX440 AGP somewhere (It got replaced by Radeon 9100).
I had the Albatron GeForce 4 MX440 - 64MB DDR / 128 bit (275/400). It was a great card for the price. I have upgraded from a TNT2, so it was a gigantic upgrade for me, and even a GeForce 2 or a Radeon 32/64 DDR would have been a great upgrade. I remember playing anything on the MX440 at that time. It was even faster than my friends GeForce 3 Ti200 in DirectX 7 games. It was also a good overclocking card. I had it running at 320 / 500 as long as I had it. So, for me and my socket A PC, was a good, accessible card. Thank's for remembering me :).
Albatron! Haven't heard that brand name in ages!
@@philscomputerlab I almost forgot it too. I also had at one point, a Albatron motherboard for 478 socket. It came in a beautifully colored box. Had i875p chipset if I recall corectley. Beautiful board.
Fun fact, I am working on a project with a Albatron 6800 GT. I think it's a plain reference model but with Albatron marketing on the cooler.
@@philscomputerlab Ha ha. Beautiful. Can't wait to see the video. The MX440 looked like the reference model too.
Cool. I got an mx440 in a dell p4 back in the day but was in my mmo phase so didnt notice any issues performance wise. I thought I had a a real geforce 4🤔, nice cards now, I use them loads for win 98 and have just got my first 460😁
I wanted a Radeon 9000 pro, but as a teenager with no income I could barely afford a no-name MX 440. Instead of 400MT/s ram, it was 333, but hey it was way more powerful than tnt 2 pro. I enjoyed using it even if it was kind of megameh.
By the way, every contemporary local magazine showed ridiculously good overclocks with 440 8x. While stock it was no faster than 4x, with that oc it was a bit faster and decently cheaper than overclocked 460.
I used the S3 Savage4 till around 2005 then came my brother and installed a Geforce4 (I couldn't specify the model) into the family computer. That gave us access to D3D8 and thus unreal tournament 2003.
Bring back memories where all reviews on Magazine advice against buying the Geforce 4 MX. Go for the Geforce 4 Ti will have stronger performance than the MX.
Great Video very intresting:)
my topic suggestin is:
how can I find a solution to eliminate the stuttering in Deues Ex and GTA SAn ANDreas?
How do I get rid of the texture errors in Hitman Codename 47?
What's the problem? I have it with every card even with my GTX 970.
I know that Hitman Codename 47 ran smoothly with the Riva TNT 2 at 1024x768 and had no texture errors and the houses were all displayed cleanly. Since I reinstalled the Riva TNT 2 Pro on the old PC, I've also had the same problems there with graphic errors and poorer performance with Hitman Codename 47. Deues EX is also affected, it even stutters on low in some places when textures are displayed from a distance otherwise it ran very smoothly inside the Unatco building.
I also noticed it in Crazy Taxi. Crazy Box runs smoothly on 640x480 and medium because you only play individual missions. But when I start the arcade mode it stutters because you drive through the whole city and have a high visibility.... the buildings are not all displayed cleanly and look muddy from the texture and there are a few graphic errors. I've tried different drivers, including older ones, and I get the same problems.... it wasn't like that before, even though I installed the same driver back then.
And GTA SAn Andreas jerks in some places reminds me something like Deues ex sometimes it runs smoothly then suddenly it jerks heavily although I have AMD AThlon 3700+ and 2GB DDR RAM and a Geforce 6600 Gt or RAdeon X800 it doesn't run smoothly at 1280x1024 maximum Details and anti-aliasing. But it should run smoothly with all settings. GTA SAn Andreas is not a demanding game
I never knew this before, but not surprised, this was my first 'real' videocard I got to be able to play counterstrike xD but at least I had the 440 with 128bit bus
I had an mx440 128mb back when, great time with it. Ugraded from TNT2 so it was a great perf. boost, so i never get those complaints, but now i do of course, still back then i was more then happy playing on it. To clarify, all in all it came with a new PC (Duron 1.4ghz, 1gb ram and mx440 128mb, if i remember).
I had Abit Siluro MX440SE 128-bit DDR with a small passive heatsink, which had slightly lower gpu clock compared to a reference MX440. DX7 and Quake 3 engine based games ran very well at 1024x768 32-bit.
hi bro need advice please..
1) n100 cpu is equal with which ryzen cpu? ryzen 5 1600 or which ryzen?
2) how good is sound card quality for beelink eq12 mini pc? is that already equal quality with modern atx pc desktop entry level motherboard nowaday?
Happy Philday
Thank you!
First card I ever bought new was a *gefroce* 4 mx - and that typo was in its bios boot screen lol.
The incompetence from the manufacturer wasn't all bad, it had the much faster memory (which it wasn't supposed to), which I later found could also overclock far past stock - these cards were highly memory constrained so it ended up going almost twice the speed of my mates geforce 4 mx with 64bit memory.
That card cost me the equivalent of $35 USD (new), times sure have changed.
How well does it handle DOS screen resolutions?
The Geforce 4 Ti I had in the day was really fussy with lower resolutions.
My test is trying to start up Dungeon Keeper and if you can watch the intro and then see the main menu it's typically a good DOS card.
Not sure, haven't used them in DOS to be honest.
@@philscomputerlab Ah the "Windows" version works just as well as a test
hello Phils please tell me I saw in the current video that you are using a wireless optical mouse can you please tell me does it work ok quite well or do you need to install a driver to work correctly
It's a basic wireless keyboard and mouse combo from Microsoft. It works just fine, Windows 98 has support for all sort of USB devices. But for actual gaming I plug in a Logitech G400 mouse, it is much smoother. Also USB.
I had a GeForce 4 MX460 in my first home server, so that poor card has never seen a videogame in its life :D I can't remember where it went, but I don't have it anymore sadly...
Hi phil.
Ive been trying to get a similar system up and running. I have an MSI K8MM3-V (MS-7181 V2.0) with an ahtlon 2600+ (1.9ghz). I use an IDE Compact Flash card (4gb), a Nvidia ti 4200 and a Creative sound blaster live (sb0060). Installing windows 98se works fine, however doing anything else results in system freezes or no booting at all. Sometimes i can install chipset drivers (5.24a) just fine and it works quite well.. then i try nvidia drivers (45.23, 66.xx, 81.xx) it stops working. Sometimes it doesnt. Sometimes everything installs just fine, but then when i try to start a game its giving me 3d errors.
Ive tried different motherboard, different HDD's different GPU's. The only thing i havent tried is a motherboard without VIA chipsets. But im having a hard time finding one for a decent price.
I have 2 big boxes with all kinds of win98 software and game i wanna show to my kids, but i cant :(
Now that you mentioned the Joystick... Don't you have some classics like the Flightstick CH Pro, Microsoft Sidewinder Force Feedback 2 or Gravis Analog Pro in your Lab to make a showcase perhaps?
Only one Sidewinder and I don't like the old analogue sticks to be honest whereas under 98 you can use modern USB sticks that are silky smooth to play.
Quick question: I hace a retro rig with Windows 98 and a Geforce 4 MX 440 8X. I play TES III: Morrowind in that machine. How it would TES III run with the 45.XX drivers? I am using Forceware 66.93 asof the moment, and was thinking of using the older drivers, but I want to know if performance is negatively affected on the older one.
Try the older drivers and see if there is a difference.
My brother bought the MX440 on ebay from Hong Kong not long after it came out. He got absolutely hammered on import tax when it arrived and would've been cheaper to buy in the UK. The performance wasn't as expected shall we say lol. This video reminds me I have a GeForce Ti4200 in the shed that has a faulty fan. Last time I searched I couldn't find a replacement part anywhere. Any recommendations?
I have a few older videos on buying cheap GPU fans from eBay or AliExpress. Just make sure the mounting holes line up.
I was avoiding nVidia like the plague in 2002-2003. I was using an 8500 LE 128MB and 9700 Pro AIW before I went back to nVidia in 2004 and purchased a 6800 GT AGP.
I have a similar one, agp version from the main gpu of this video. Mine is having a check mark on the 4mx 440, not on fx 5200.
Tachyon is great, also player character voice by the main himself, Bruce Campbell... Groovy.
That card was my introduction to PC gaming. Came with a Packard Bell Pre-Build. Even without internet I found out after some years that this card was no good for anything modern. Switched to a 6600GT.