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 :))
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.
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.
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.
@@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.
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.
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.
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
@@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 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!
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!
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.
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!
@@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.
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 =)
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.
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.
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
@@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.
@@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. :/
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).
And 20 years later we have 40 series cards continuing proud tradition of deceiving uninformed customers. 8Gb card for 300 and 400$ with mere few % perf increase on average and even slower than last gen thanks to "generous" 128 bit interface. And yet nVidia still has 85% market share, so I guess people don't know or don't care or both...
There has been an MX4000 sitting on my local marketplace at $5 for a few months and even for that price I'm not sure if I can be arsed to make the trip across my city
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.
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.
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 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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 !
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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
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!
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.
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.
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
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.
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. ( UA-camr 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.
@@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!
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.
I bought a GeForce 4 MX440 with a motherboard bundle in June 2002 (A Gigabyte GA-7VRXP, which supports AMD Athlon XP processors and DDR333/PC2700 memory). I mistakenly thought that the MX440 was a good deal, but I had not done my homework. I made another mistake by replacing my MX440 in early August 2003 (almost exactly 20 years ago) with a GeForce FX 5600/256 MB GPU. While I certainly enjoyed the extra video memory and DirectX 8/9 support, the performance of the FX 5600 seemed like it was about the same as the MX440. Still, both cards worked very well for me, particularly with OpenGL games (i.e., Jedi Outcast). As for retro gaming, as you demonstrated, all of these cards do really well with Win98SE, especially when paired with a decent Pentium 4 or Athlon 64. For a Win98SE build, I would definitely recommend the MX440, MX460, Ti 4200 or FX 5600 if prices are still reasonable. Thanks for another fantastic video!
That's a shame for the FX5600 as I find it to be a great "sleeper" card that flies under the radar (at least the non-XT version). Mine performs (in 3dMark tests, anyways) nearly as well as the ATI Radeon 8500 and 9600 and significantly better than an FX 5200 or 5500.
That's the thing with going from MX to FX, the FX supported Direct3D 9, which is way more demanding. It is harder to notice the better graphics than it is performance. With Direct3D 9 you really wanted a Radeon 9700 which was a high end card at the time...
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!
I think I had a 440 MX back then, jumped to a 5200 or a 5500 just to have the new shaders and be able to play Silent Hill 2 and other newer titles. Since then I'm on red team forever.
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 sell thousends of these cards in 2002-2004, and only Far Cry release in 2004 forced people to change them to fx5600 or radeon 9600 and later in 2004 for nvidia's bestseller geforce 6600
I've got the 440 in my P3 build. It's certainly better than the TNT2 Vanta 8MB or Rage 128 32MB PCI cards I have. 3dMark99 seems to be CPU bottlenecked on my system, as all the cards get about the same FPS. Feels like a bug to me.
I watched a lot of hardware creators on UA-cam. 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!
Back then it was not like a today, when 3years old card is still very powerful and useful. Gforce 3 from 2001 was literally useless in 2003-4, as had only 1.1 shaders, even in 2002 games like Unreal Tournament 2003 require real GForce 4, or ATI 9700/9500, on Gforce 3 it was running 8fps and now imagine, that Nvidia has been selling to customers rebranded GeForce 2 as GeForce 4 MX. Many people has been very very unpleasantly surprised, when they have got error message on screen, that "sorry shaders not found".
MX -> R9550 was the "decent budget GPU" ladder at the time. I got an R9600 in the summer of '03. By Christmas, R9550 was out with pretty much the same specs, and could be found at half the price, so I felt a bit shafted, haha.
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.
The thing that annoyed me most about these cards.. the GF4MX, FX5200 and the Radeon 9200 variants was the lack of specifications from the manufacturer regarding the memory interface used on the cards. It seemed like a massive scam at the time, and few reviews even bothered to go into those details. Even today I still find lots of 64-bit cards in hard rubbish PCs, especially FX5200. In the day, I upgraded from a Kyro 2 to a Ti4200...
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.
I had a GeForce 4 MX 440 once, useful for older games like CnC Generals and Warcraft III. But not for games that requiring like more advanced shaders like Act of War Direct Action which in such cases, won't work.
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
Yeah, I remember everyone was excited by the GF4 MX series, and the GF2 MX series before it. I have no idea why, none of them ever seemed like very good cards. At the time I was subscribed to PC Authority and Atomic magazine, so I saw the reviews. You were better off buying a second hand card that was more high-end. I guess they were fine for older games, but basically anything current wouldn't play well unless you really dropped the details or resolution. Personally, I kept my GF2 GTS 64MB for quite a number of months after the GF4 series was released. With a mild overclock, it wasn't far behind a stock GF3. But then ATI released the 9700 and 9700 Pro, and retailers were discounting the GF4 series, so I picked up a Ti4600 for a very decent price and got a pretty good boost in performance. From memory, the 9700 was way ahead of anything nVidia had to offer for quite some time, but it was also pretty expensive, so I wasn't that tempted to jump ship to team red. In hindsight, I would've been better off buying a second hand 9700 Pro for my next upgrade instead of the GF FX 5700 Ultra. It was a big upgrade over the GF4, but the 9700 series was just too good.
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 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🤩🤩
Max Payne: don't forget to try opening all the lockers, cabinets, and drawers in each room. Small wooden crates are also breakable to uncover health and ammo
My first PC an old dell did not have an AGP slot. I remember having a MX card but in regular PCI it was barely better than onboard graphics. Ton of games it couldn't play due to shader and lighting effects. Still I played Morrowind like crazy on that pc I just didn't know any better. Later I passed it down to my kid and found a 128mb mx for pci slot and it did much better I just forget the models.
The cpu 3400 athlon might perform better with a ati 9800 or nvidia 6600 gt or even an ati 800 or nvidia 7600 - Im pretty shure but its up to the powersupply -I still remember my Hipper 550w psu broke down when using an Ati 850 PE for some time - a year and i was bought for that gpu at the same time.
The GeForce 4 MX was a piece of crap compared to contemporaries at the time, but it's not so bad for a low-end retro gaming PC, especially with its relaxed power requirements. Based-on my personal experience it still powers through Quake III Arena and Unreal Tournament 99 like a champ at 800x600, but it will start to really struggle with games made around 2002 and later (but subpar performance is honestly part of the experience when it comes to retro PC gaming, at-least to me- most of us couldn't afford or figure out how to get better hardware at the time and neither did our parents lol). By the way Phil, you happen to have any experience running the GoG version of Arcanum under Windows 98SE? I've been trying to run it but it gets errors even when renaming or deleting the DLL's made to run it on modern Windows. Total Annihilation's awesome by the way, check out Supreme Commander too if you haven't!
I feel like i motivated you a little bit with my comment in a later video about my GF4 420mx. But mate i did beat DOOM III with that GPU and Duron 1100 , 768MB ram. Average fps was under 10fps. I used a method by unpacking some texture files for more speed, dont know if it worked.
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? :)
I picked a GeForce MX4000 for my ThinkPad T23 setup. For a docking station setup where the space for a PCI card is very small and actually cannot accommodate the other GeForce4 series cards (nor anything newer without bottlenecking the GPU anyway), the MX4000 and 440 are valid.
You can put a card in the docking station? I have a PCI MX4000 and it's okay but I don't like that I have to use newer drivers with it. I use it in a intel 810 socket 370 with no AGP.
@@icqme8586 The ThinkPad Dock type 2631 and 2877 feature a single PCI slot at standard length for all the GPU, OPL, USB or RJ11 you could want. It's pretty cramped so it will definitely be warm inside. The MX4000 is great then because it isn't melting and it's a solid upgrade for a majority of the Thinkpads it works with. My T23 has an S3 SuperSavage with 16MB of VRAM, and the MX4000 brings me DX8 support and 64MB of VRAM. Or I could always go with a Voodoo 3. It just *barely* fits.
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
My primary way of getting computer parts back in the day as a poor teen was dumpster diving for peoples tossed scraps so i am very familiar with the GeForce 2 MX and GeForce 4 MX lineups, I didn't like them 😩😩😩
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.
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 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 :).
@@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.
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.
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.
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.
i remmember the time when you wanted to play Serious Sam 2, F.E.A.R, and Prince of Persia Sands of Time and none of them accepted the GForce 4 MX, but the FX
MX4000s by XFX were super common in Argentina. They came with 128MB on a 64b bus, or 64MB on a 32b(!) bus. Apart from the... "not great" performance, i have seen several with bulging capacitors...
I bought a TNT2 Ultra and paid handsomely for it and then the hardware T&L support became mandatory and i didn't feel like blowing another $300+ on a gfx card so i got a geforce 4 mx so games would start and not stall and throw a no hardware T&L support detected.
Я люблю mx400/mx440. Они позволяют играть во многие игры как под 98, так и под XP начала 00х даже с урезанным DirectX (включая GTA VC и NFS U). И таких видеокарт всегда есть в наличии по сути бесплатно! И компонентный видеовыход позволяет просто подключать ваш ПК к ТВ и использовать вашу машину как медиа-центр для просмотра фильмов или для эмуляции ретро-консолей. Это идеальный вариант для машин на базе P2/P3 и так же всегда пригодиться как затычка для P4 478
I think the pipeline configuration of these MX-cards was a bit disapointing. The GeForce-2 GTS had 4 pixel pipes and 8 texture mapping units. The GeForce-4 MX has only 2 pipes and 2 TMUs. An enhanced NV15 would have been the ultimate Dx7 experience.
For future video ideas: If I'm going to build PCs for retro gaming rather than resorting to emulation, I would want to go one of two routes: 1. A PC (for any given OS) that is as fast as possible while maintaining full compatibility. 2. PCs that can dual-boot 2+ OSes (i.e. Win98 & WinXP) while being able to play any game reliably in both OSes... To cut down on the number of physical PCs I have to deal with.
I have no idea how feasible this is, but that's why I watch your videos. You are infinitely more knowledgeable about the subject than I can ever hope to be, and I appreciate all the work you put into sharing that knowledge with the rest of us... Thank you!
The problem I see with #2 is that the WinXP era lasted so long that you would have a hard time playing late WinXP-era games on a system with Win98 compatible parts. But, a lot of those late era game will run on modern systems, so maybe that’s not such a problem.
➕ 1 point for a mention of Finland. Max Payne tips? It's been a while but if my memory serves me right... You want to avoid standing or lying still when bullets fly. Like plague. Check every room for pills and don't forget to use the bullet time.
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. 😮
@@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. 😅
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!
It didn't lack DX8 though. It supported pixel shaders with NSR. Doom 3 looks like it does exactly because of it.
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.
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.
6:40 That's a name I haven't heard in a while. I loved the Delta Force series and Joint Operations Typhoon Rising!
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 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 😊
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!
11:25 - TA is an absolute classic, one of my favorite RTS games.
The 440 MX 128 has been in my Win98/2K PC for years and I absolutely love it for 90s accelerated games.
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?
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.
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 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 =)
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 still own a box copy of Tachyon the Fringe. I remember buying it because it was voiced by Bruce Cambell.
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.
You could find white box cards for this series starting at $69 back then . I really miss those cards lol . I have the MX460 for a semperon build
Good afternoon Phil
I used to have the Nvidia GeForce MX/MX400 in both 64 megabytes of RAM and 128 MB I got that one at TigerDirect many many many years and both surprisingly enough each was 256-bit bus 8X AGP
Woah nice!
I'd say that TNT2 M64 was their first "not what it sounds like" type of a card. And yeah Phil, the MX 420 is the SDR version you mentioned.
The first computer I bought with my own money (and our first with 3D acceleration) had a 32MB TNT2 M64. I was so disappointed by it... :(
@@Ale.K7 Why were you disappointed with it? The M64 was a very capable budget card for the time. The only real deficiencies it had were in 32 bit color or high resolutions, which were held back by the 64 bit memory bus. 32 bit color at the time in games was still a new thing and commanded a premium to render at that quality level with acceptable performance.
Likely because TNT2 M64 was still used for budget PCs as a socket filler as late as geforce 2 by OEMs. It wasn’t until geforce 2 mx they stopped shipping TNT2 M64. A TNT2 M64 in 1999 was perfectly acceptable. One resolution lower than M64 pro you got the same framerate; so e.g. 800x600 instead 1024x768.
TNT2 pro; not M64 pro. 😜
@@soylentgreenb But a normal consumer didn't know what that M64 meant. Normal consumer was most likely "OH BOY, A TNT2!" or something but the reality was bad. :/
I have a GF4 MX in a laptop. Newest drivers that were supporting GF4 MX series didn't work. Had to install some beta drivers, otherwise Silent Hill2 wouldn't run properly. I also have GF4 MX440 AGP somewhere (It got replaced by Radeon 9100).
Time for another night of Phil's Computer Lab
And 20 years later we have 40 series cards continuing proud tradition of deceiving uninformed customers. 8Gb card for 300 and 400$ with mere few % perf increase on average and even slower than last gen thanks to "generous" 128 bit interface. And yet nVidia still has 85% market share, so I guess people don't know or don't care or both...
There has been an MX4000 sitting on my local marketplace at $5 for a few months and even for that price I'm not sure if I can be arsed to make the trip across my city
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!
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.
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 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).
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 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.
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 !
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
I remember the ruckus this card brought forth back then, great video as usual!
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
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!
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.
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.
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 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.
I beat UT 2003 on a GeForce 2 MX 200. It ran at like 15fps.
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. ( UA-camr 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!
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 😂🤦♂️
I bought a GeForce 4 MX440 with a motherboard bundle in June 2002 (A Gigabyte GA-7VRXP, which supports AMD Athlon XP processors and DDR333/PC2700 memory). I mistakenly thought that the MX440 was a good deal, but I had not done my homework. I made another mistake by replacing my MX440 in early August 2003 (almost exactly 20 years ago) with a GeForce FX 5600/256 MB GPU. While I certainly enjoyed the extra video memory and DirectX 8/9 support, the performance of the FX 5600 seemed like it was about the same as the MX440. Still, both cards worked very well for me, particularly with OpenGL games (i.e., Jedi Outcast). As for retro gaming, as you demonstrated, all of these cards do really well with Win98SE, especially when paired with a decent Pentium 4 or Athlon 64. For a Win98SE build, I would definitely recommend the MX440, MX460, Ti 4200 or FX 5600 if prices are still reasonable. Thanks for another fantastic video!
That's a shame for the FX5600 as I find it to be a great "sleeper" card that flies under the radar (at least the non-XT version). Mine performs (in 3dMark tests, anyways) nearly as well as the ATI Radeon 8500 and 9600 and significantly better than an FX 5200 or 5500.
That's the thing with going from MX to FX, the FX supported Direct3D 9, which is way more demanding. It is harder to notice the better graphics than it is performance. With Direct3D 9 you really wanted a Radeon 9700 which was a high end card at the time...
It was pretty crazy to see that these cards were in every way inferior to my Geforce 2 Ti in game benchmarks.
I have use the ELSA GLADIAC 511 GeFORCE 2 MX 64MB 128b a long time 2001-2005 and I have played all games in low middle fine without problems
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.
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!
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!
I think I had a 440 MX back then, jumped to a 5200 or a 5500 just to have the new shaders and be able to play Silent Hill 2 and other newer titles.
Since then I'm on red team forever.
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.
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 sell thousends of these cards in 2002-2004, and only Far Cry release in 2004 forced people to change them to fx5600 or radeon 9600 and later in 2004 for nvidia's bestseller geforce 6600
I've got the 440 in my P3 build. It's certainly better than the TNT2 Vanta 8MB or Rage 128 32MB PCI cards I have. 3dMark99 seems to be CPU bottlenecked on my system, as all the cards get about the same FPS. Feels like a bug to me.
I watched a lot of hardware creators on UA-cam. 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!
Back then it was not like a today, when 3years old card is still very powerful and useful. Gforce 3 from 2001 was literally useless in 2003-4, as had only 1.1 shaders, even in 2002 games like Unreal Tournament 2003 require real GForce 4, or ATI 9700/9500, on Gforce 3 it was running 8fps and now imagine, that Nvidia has been selling to customers rebranded GeForce 2 as GeForce 4 MX. Many people has been very very unpleasantly surprised, when they have got error message on screen, that "sorry shaders not found".
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.
MX -> R9550 was the "decent budget GPU" ladder at the time. I got an R9600 in the summer of '03. By Christmas, R9550 was out with pretty much the same specs, and could be found at half the price, so I felt a bit shafted, haha.
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.
I remember one time at a lan party and my ancient geforce 2 gts ran circles around these things in counter strike 1.4
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.
The thing that annoyed me most about these cards.. the GF4MX, FX5200 and the Radeon 9200 variants was the lack of specifications from the manufacturer regarding the memory interface used on the cards. It seemed like a massive scam at the time, and few reviews even bothered to go into those details. Even today I still find lots of 64-bit cards in hard rubbish PCs, especially FX5200. In the day, I upgraded from a Kyro 2 to a Ti4200...
I agree! All the reviews had 5200 Ultra. Every one if my 5200 have 64-But interface...
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.
I had a GeForce 4 MX 440 once, useful for older games like CnC Generals and Warcraft III. But not for games that requiring like more advanced shaders like Act of War Direct Action which in such cases, won't work.
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
Blame the GF4 MX series for DX8 getting so little support and DX7 hanging on in games for entirely too long.
I bought the MX460 from Medion early this year, but I've yet to install it in anything, too many cards
Yeah, I remember everyone was excited by the GF4 MX series, and the GF2 MX series before it. I have no idea why, none of them ever seemed like very good cards. At the time I was subscribed to PC Authority and Atomic magazine, so I saw the reviews. You were better off buying a second hand card that was more high-end. I guess they were fine for older games, but basically anything current wouldn't play well unless you really dropped the details or resolution.
Personally, I kept my GF2 GTS 64MB for quite a number of months after the GF4 series was released. With a mild overclock, it wasn't far behind a stock GF3. But then ATI released the 9700 and 9700 Pro, and retailers were discounting the GF4 series, so I picked up a Ti4600 for a very decent price and got a pretty good boost in performance. From memory, the 9700 was way ahead of anything nVidia had to offer for quite some time, but it was also pretty expensive, so I wasn't that tempted to jump ship to team red.
In hindsight, I would've been better off buying a second hand 9700 Pro for my next upgrade instead of the GF FX 5700 Ultra. It was a big upgrade over the GF4, but the 9700 series was just too good.
My Win98 is using Mx440 256 mb with Directx 8. Playing MW4 Vengance and Comanche vs Hokum. No issues
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 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🤩🤩
Max Payne: don't forget to try opening all the lockers, cabinets, and drawers in each room. Small wooden crates are also breakable to uncover health and ammo
Yea I did but still died a lot! I got a few tips already though, so will try it again with a future project.
My first PC an old dell did not have an AGP slot. I remember having a MX card but in regular PCI it was barely better than onboard graphics. Ton of games it couldn't play due to shader and lighting effects. Still I played Morrowind like crazy on that pc I just didn't know any better. Later I passed it down to my kid and found a 128mb mx for pci slot and it did much better I just forget the models.
The cpu 3400 athlon might perform better with a ati 9800 or nvidia 6600 gt or even an ati 800 or nvidia 7600 - Im pretty shure but its up to the powersupply -I still remember my Hipper 550w psu broke down when using an Ati 850 PE for some time - a year and i was bought for that gpu at the same time.
The GeForce 4 MX was a piece of crap compared to contemporaries at the time, but it's not so bad for a low-end retro gaming PC, especially with its relaxed power requirements. Based-on my personal experience it still powers through Quake III Arena and Unreal Tournament 99 like a champ at 800x600, but it will start to really struggle with games made around 2002 and later (but subpar performance is honestly part of the experience when it comes to retro PC gaming, at-least to me- most of us couldn't afford or figure out how to get better hardware at the time and neither did our parents lol).
By the way Phil, you happen to have any experience running the GoG version of Arcanum under Windows 98SE? I've been trying to run it but it gets errors even when renaming or deleting the DLL's made to run it on modern Windows.
Total Annihilation's awesome by the way, check out Supreme Commander too if you haven't!
I feel like i motivated you a little bit with my comment in a later video about my GF4 420mx. But mate i did beat DOOM III with that GPU and Duron 1100 , 768MB ram. Average fps was under 10fps. I used a method by unpacking some texture files for more speed, dont know if it worked.
Finishing Doom 3 on that card, hat off to you!
I love Tachyon: The Fringe so much. Spent many hours playing it back in the day. Same with Max Payne haha.
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 picked a GeForce MX4000 for my ThinkPad T23 setup. For a docking station setup where the space for a PCI card is very small and actually cannot accommodate the other GeForce4 series cards (nor anything newer without bottlenecking the GPU anyway), the MX4000 and 440 are valid.
You can put a card in the docking station? I have a PCI MX4000 and it's okay but I don't like that I have to use newer drivers with it. I use it in a intel 810 socket 370 with no AGP.
@@icqme8586 The ThinkPad Dock type 2631 and 2877 feature a single PCI slot at standard length for all the GPU, OPL, USB or RJ11 you could want. It's pretty cramped so it will definitely be warm inside. The MX4000 is great then because it isn't melting and it's a solid upgrade for a majority of the Thinkpads it works with. My T23 has an S3 SuperSavage with 16MB of VRAM, and the MX4000 brings me DX8 support and 64MB of VRAM. Or I could always go with a Voodoo 3. It just *barely* fits.
Happy Friday Phil! Thanks for covering this card 👍
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!
My primary way of getting computer parts back in the day as a poor teen was dumpster diving for peoples tossed scraps so i am very familiar with the GeForce 2 MX and GeForce 4 MX lineups, I didn't like them 😩😩😩
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
i remmember the time when you wanted to play Serious Sam 2, F.E.A.R, and Prince of Persia Sands of Time and none of them accepted the GForce 4 MX, but the FX
MX4000s by XFX were super common in Argentina. They came with 128MB on a 64b bus, or 64MB on a 32b(!) bus. Apart from the... "not great" performance, i have seen several with bulging capacitors...
literally mx4000 had Geforce 2mx performance....
@@mirific87 Not the 32b memory bus version. And it was still being sold in 2005 (and leven later)!
I bought a TNT2 Ultra and paid handsomely for it and then the hardware T&L support became mandatory and i didn't feel like blowing another $300+ on a gfx card so i got a geforce 4 mx so games would start and not stall and throw a no hardware T&L support detected.
Я люблю mx400/mx440.
Они позволяют играть во многие игры как под 98, так и под XP начала 00х даже с урезанным DirectX (включая GTA VC и NFS U).
И таких видеокарт всегда есть в наличии по сути бесплатно! И компонентный видеовыход позволяет просто подключать ваш ПК к ТВ и использовать вашу машину как медиа-центр для просмотра фильмов или для эмуляции ретро-консолей.
Это идеальный вариант для машин на базе P2/P3 и так же всегда пригодиться как затычка для P4 478
I think the pipeline configuration of these MX-cards was a bit disapointing. The GeForce-2 GTS had 4 pixel pipes and 8 texture mapping units. The GeForce-4 MX has only 2 pipes and 2 TMUs. An enhanced NV15 would have been the ultimate Dx7 experience.
For future video ideas: If I'm going to build PCs for retro gaming rather than resorting to emulation, I would want to go one of two routes:
1. A PC (for any given OS) that is as fast as possible while maintaining full compatibility.
2. PCs that can dual-boot 2+ OSes (i.e. Win98 & WinXP) while being able to play any game reliably in both OSes... To cut down on the number of physical PCs I have to deal with.
I have no idea how feasible this is, but that's why I watch your videos. You are infinitely more knowledgeable about the subject than I can ever hope to be, and I appreciate all the work you put into sharing that knowledge with the rest of us... Thank you!
The problem I see with #2 is that the WinXP era lasted so long that you would have a hard time playing late WinXP-era games on a system with Win98 compatible parts. But, a lot of those late era game will run on modern systems, so maybe that’s not such a problem.
@@megadog_ Yeah, the example I gave is probably the hardest dual-boot scenario to do well, if it even truly can be done well.
➕ 1 point for a mention of Finland. Max Payne tips? It's been a while but if my memory serves me right... You want to avoid standing or lying still when bullets fly. Like plague. Check every room for pills and don't forget to use the bullet time.
Okie will keep playing it 😁
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. 😅
Max Payne is one of those games like Tomb Raider basically, were you save at every corner.
That makes sense! Quick save early 😂
Agrred. Love my MX440 because of passiv cooling and DVI support. Also usable in older AGP2x and more modern 4x rigs. Very versatile.