What distinguishes these cards from the competition and how they perform are we going to look at in a moment. First let us start of with a small introduction to nVidia’s GeForce MX-line especially the NV18-GPU since we have not reviewed any MX-based cards earlier here at Nordichardware.
Instead of wasting any more time on the AGP 8x function of these cards we recommend you to read our AGP 8x write-up here to see what benefits this technology might bring.
Gainward has
been making video cards since 1984 but not until the last two years has
the company gained a strong reputation in the consumer market. Their heavy
marketing efforts aimed towards the enthusiast crowd have paid off. Nowadays
Gainward products are seen as high quality offerings with that something extra
whether it is faster onboard memory than their competitors or that eye-catching
red PCB.
Today we proudly announce our review of their two latest additions to the
company’s product line, the Gainward Pro/600-8X XP based on nVidia’s NV18-circuit
and the Gainward Ultra/750-8X XP with the NV28-chip.
What distinguishes
these cards from the competition and how they perform are we going to look
at in a moment. First let us start of with a small introduction to nVidia’s
GeForce MX-line especially the NV18-GPU since we have not reviewed any MX-based
cards earlier here at Nordichardware.
Instead of wasting any more time on the AGP 8x function of these cards we
recommend you to read our AGP 8x write-up here to see what benefits this technology
might bring.
The Geforce 4
line of video cards was launched in February 2002 as nVidia introduced
their NV17 and NV25 GPU’s. The cards based on the NV25 core were sold under
the Titanium name or abbreviated Ti and made up nVidia’s high-end product
line. The Titanium cards came in three model types named Ti4600, Ti4400 and
Ti4200. What distinguished these cards from each other, were the operating
clock speeds, amount of onboard memory and of course the price. Even though
the Ti4200 was a lot cheaper than the flagship model the Ti4600, there was
still a large gap to fill in the low-end market. Therefore nVidia launched
the GeForce 4 MX series built around the NV17 core. The “MX” name
was first introduced with the GeForce 2 line of video cards were the MX line
was used for the low-price GeForce 2 cards. Since the term “MX”
had grown to become a strong brand name just like the “Ti” abbreviation,
first introduced with the GeForce 3 line of cards, it was obvious that nVidia
was going to keep using these names as consumers already are familiar with
these terms. But there is also another explanation why the MX name was kept,
the GeForce 4 MX is not a fully fledged GeForce 4 card, rather it is more
of a further improved GeForce 2. Certainly the card features numerous improvements
over its predecessor where the faster operating clock speeds is the most significant
one. The remaining improvements are listed below:
produced with 15µ technology
Light Speed
Memory Architecture II which enhances memory performance (the MX cards only
have a two-segmented crossbar memory controller in comparison to the 4-segment
memory controller featured on the Ti cards)
Accuview Anti Aliasing support (which required a move from Super Sampling
to the more effective Multi Sampling)
nView
which is nVidia’s technology for connecting multiple monitors/TV’s to the
cards
Video
Processing Engine which enables hardware playback of DVD movies for example
Also the NV17 is lacking Vertex- and Pixel Shader support. Therefore MX cards
do not fully support DirectX 8.xx. Instead nVidia offer Vertex Shader support
by letting the CPU handle these conditions.
As with the Ti
cards the MX-series was launched in three different flavors. Once again the
differences are made up out of operating clock speeds, amount of onboard memory
but in this case also type of memory. Both the MX460 and MX440 use DDR SDRAM
while the MX420 uses SDR SDRAM. At the launch the MX cards where only available
with 64MB of onboard memory but nowadays they can be found with both 64MB
and 128MB.
Ten months have
passed since the launch of the GeForce 4 series but nVidia has no plans to
kill this product yet, at least not the bestsellers in the GeForce 4 line-up,
which of course are the affordable MX and Ti4200 cards. Therefore a new revision
of these core products was presented last november, the NV18 and NV28 which
the cards in this review are built around. It is hardly a coincidence that
this strategic move was made shortly before the christmas sales took off.
So what’s new you ask? Well nVidia decided to implement AGP 8x support as
well as raising the default operating speeds of these GPU’s. The AGP 8x support
raises the AGP bandwidth from 1.1 GB/s to 2.1 GB/s but this hardly improves
performance in today’s applications which do not yet take advantage of the
higher bandwidth. The operating speeds of the MX440 were raised from 250/400
to 275/500 with the launch of the NV18. The NV28 GPU has been covered extensively
in an older review so if you feel like refreshing your memory or learn a bit
more on this GPU, take a look in our archive. The chart
below shows the operating speeds of the NV18 and NV28 compared to its predecessors.
Now that we have covered the most interesting theoretic aspects of these cores
let’s see how Gainward has made use of them.
The box may not
be the prettiest thing I have seen, but then again we are not reviewing the
artwork. Those of you that read our review of Gainward’s Ti-4200 card will
recognize the box since the only difference is the sticker bearing the product
name.
As always with Gainward
the card is manufactured on a red PCB
Gainward Mx440 8x
Backside, no memory modules.
Cooling Gainward style
I/O ports DVI, VGA, SVHS
Underneath the
sexy red memory heatsinks we find four 16MB Samsung BGA chips rated at 3,3ns.
Whether the heatsinks on the memory actually bring any performance gains is
arguable since Ball Grid Array memory modules, as used in this card, seldom
become as hot as regular modules under operation. The 3,3ns rating equals
about 606MHz memory speed which gives us ample headroom for overclocking,
the default operation speed on this cards is 275/513 which is slightly higher
than the default speed recommended by nVidia.
A closer look at the cooler and the thermal grease.
The cooling on
the card might not be the most powerful we have seen, but it does its job
very well as we will see in the overclocking tests. Fan noise is definitely
not a problem with this card as the fan to our big surprise ran very quiet.
It is good to see that manufacturers finally start to apply thermal grease
to their GPU’s. It isn’t really Arctic Silver, but hey, better than nothing.
Accessories
The bundle contains
necessary drivers, Gainward’s own tweaking tool “Expert Tool”,
Intervideo WinDVD as well as software for video capturing. There were no games
bundled with the card. Gainward also included a DVI-to-VGA adaptor which comes
in a matching red color.
Gainward GeForce 4 Ti4200-8X Ultra/750-8X XP
Core:
nVidia nv28
Manufacturing process:
0.15-micron
Transistors:
~63 mil.
GPU clock:
250 MHz
Memory clock:
512 MHz
Ramdac:
(2) 350 MHz
Memory amount:
128 MB
Memory type:
128-bit DDR-SDRAM, BGA 3,3ns
I/O-Ports:
VGA (Stereo), DVI-I, S-Video I/O and Composite I/O
nVidia
WHQL- and beta drivers, nVidia WDM-driver, Gainward Expert Tool, VGA-BIOS
Flashtool, Adobe Acrobat Reader, EnTech Power Strip and E-Color
Fullversion programs(XX??)X:
Intervideo WinDVD, Intervideo WinProducer, Intervideo WinCoder,
Serious Sam
Estimated retail price:
~3500SEK
Gainward Ti4200-8x
Back of the card
The cooling in
this card is exactly the same as on the older Ti-4200 card we reviewed earlier
this year. The only design difference between the two cards, as far as we
know, is that that this cards is built on a 8-layer PCB just like the Ti-4400/4600
cards, sports a better handpicked core and this time around comes with 3,3ns
memory instead of the 4ns modules used on the regular Ti-4200.
3 port Firewire-card
3D-glasses
Now here is what
really distinguishes Gainward from the rest of the crowd. Included in the
bundle is a 3-port Firewire PCI card and 3D-glasses. Unfortunately there were
no drivers for the 3D-glasses included in our package, but after some searching
we managed to find some beta-drivers that supported them. Still there remained
a problem with the refresh rate which was locked to 60Hz.
Accessories
The software bundled with
the card was the same as for the MX-440 8x card except for a ViVo-adaptor,
the 3D-shooter Serious Sam and a Firewire cable.
We chose to compare the two Gainward cards with two cards from nVidia’s competitor,
Ati, that are on the same price level as the Gainward cards.
Return
To Castle Wolfenstein v1.33
Aquamark v2.3
3D Mark 2001 SE v330
The main benchmarks for
this review are Aquamark and Return to Castle Wolfenstein. Maximum image quality
and overclocking are tested with Futuremark’s 3D-Mark 2001.
Aquamark was one of the
first games using DirectX 8.xx specific functions. Therefore it is best played
on cards that fully support Vertex- and Pixel Shaders. In our tests the MX440-8x
card was the only which does not fully support these features.
As expected,
the MX440-8x has a hard time coping with this test. The Ti4200-8x on the other
hard does very well and is not far behind the leader the Radeon 9700. Being
part of a newer generation of video cards one would except the Radeon 9700
to do some serious damage to the older Ti-4200 8x, but this is not the case
on our test system. Though we urge you to bear in mind that CPU scaling has
quite a large effect on performance with the Radeon 9700, and we think that
the cards advantage would have been larger had we been able to test the cards
on a faster CPU.
Our second game for
benchmarking is id Software’s RTCW which takes us of the Quake 3 engine.
This game is rather CPU intensive which we soon will find out.
John Carmack at id Software really knows how to optimize a
game engine. At a resolution of 1024×768 all the cards perform almost equally
well. Surprisingly the Radeon 9700 lags behind the Ti4200-8x. As soon as we
crank up the resolution though, the real winners emerge. Still our Ti4200-8x
manages to keep up quite well with the Radeon 9700 as long as we run it in
Gainward’s “Enhanced Mode” setting.
In contrary to the Aquamark benchmarks the MX400-8x turns things around in
this test as it manages to pull ahead of the Radeon 9000 Pro, especially when
run at “Enhanced Mode” speeds. As we can see from the benchmarks
nVidia cards perform very well under the Open GL based Q3-engine.
Even with 2xFSAA
enabled the picture remains more or less the same. The Ti4200-8x clings on to
the Radeon 9700 whilst the MX440-8x dominates the budget sector as long as it
is run in “Enhanced Mode”.
Turning the heat
up a notch by enabling 4xFSAA doesn’t impose too much of a problem for the
more expensive cards, though the cheaper cards have a hard time maintaining
a playable framerate. For the Radeon 9700 the CPU bottleneck still is the
largest problem, limiting its performance. This baby has a lot more under
its hood than we can see from these benchmarks.
In the final tests we push our two high-end cards to their
limits
In these tests
we have enabled both FSAA and anisotropic filtering. If you buy a card in this
price range you would expect them to perform well even with both these requiring
functions enabled. The MX440-8x is left out in these tests as it does not fully
support anisotropic filtering and the performance is too poor when running under
these conditions. (The Radeon 9000 Pro doesn’t handle these settings too
well either why it is also left out)
Here we can clearly see
how the cheaper Radeon 9700 gives the Gainward card a serious pounding.
Things hardly get better
for the Gainward card as we raise the bar another notch. The Radeon 9700 almost
brings twice the performance of the Ti4200-8x card so we decided that testing
the card in anything other than Enhanced Mode didn’t feel necessary.
Max. Overclocking
The chart below shows
the 3D-Mark scores for our contenders when overclocked to their limit.
For the M440-8x the clock frequencies were 347/647 and for the Ti4200-8x the
limit was reached at 294/648.
We had high hopes
for the Ti4200-8x in the overclocking tests, but unfortunately the card would
hardly go past its “Enhanced Mode” settings which are 290/637.
Even at default settings the Radeon 9700 would outperform the Gainward card
with over 1000 3D-Marks. The MX440-8x turned out to be one hell of an overclocker
but still it was beaten by the Radeon 9000 Pro at default settings.
Onward to our conclusions.
Let us start
by summarizing our experience with the MX440-8x card. In regards to the given
preconditions, Gainward did a very good job with building a solid card that
overclocks extremely well. The problem with the card is its NV18 core that
more or less is a spoofed up Geforce2 core. Therefore the performance is somewhat
mediocre. The absence of hardware support for Vertex and Pixel Shaders hardly
brings up the final score. Another issue with the NV18 core is that it theoretically
supports 8x anisotropic filtering but nVidia chose to restrict the core to
2x anisotropic filtering. Instead they implemented support for 4xFSAA which
we feel is way too demanding for the core. These issues are not Gainward’s
fault, but we feel that they must be compensated in some way and therefore
the price tag should reflect the lower performance of the cards based on the
NV18 core. As a matter of fact the price tag is the Achilles heel of the Gainward
Ultra 600/Pro-8x XP as you for the same price could purchase a severely better
performing Ti4200 card. Had the price been a bit lower could we easily have
justified a higher score than the not so spectacular “7” we gave
the card. The ViVo function is of course a welcome bonus but still not enough
to recommend the Ultra 600/Pro-8x XP over any Ti4200 card.
Concerning
the Ti4200-8x you should require 3D-glasses, ViVo and Firewire in order to
motivate a purchase of this card. Are these functions minimum requirements
when purchasing your video card you can hardly find a better offering than
Gainward’s. As with the MX440-8x the price is set way too high. For
500SEK less you can purchase a Radeon 9700 which outperforms the Ti4200 8x
in all tests and also boasts features the Ti4200 8x does not even support.
Even if you are content with the cards current performance there are still
cheaper Ti4200 cards that overclock as well or even better for 1000SEK less.
The Gainward Ultra 750/Pro-8x XP is at a very small target market, if you
are part of this segment the card is a very good buy otherwise there are cheaper
and performance wise better alternatives which makes it rather hard to grade
this particular card. We feel that most consumers are aware of what functions
they seek in a card, and therefore the above mentioned features that set the
Gainward Ti4200-8x card apart from the rest, are considered as strong benefits.
We also
would like to mention that both of these cards are available in less exclusive
editions for a lower price, but then you have to miss out on the extra accessories
and often the "Enhanced Mode"-function or at least the high clock
speeds in EM featured on our two test cards.
Gainward Ultra/750-8X XP Strengths:
+ Good software package
+ Gainward-certified overclocking through "Enhanced Mode"
+ Good 2D image quality
+ 3D-glasses
+ ViVo and Firewire-ports
Weaknesses:
– Price is several hundred
crowns higher than rivaling products offering even better performance
– almost no overclocking beyond "Enhanced Mode" settings
Score: 7.0/10
Gainward Ultra/600-8X XP Strengths:
+ quiet fan
+ excellent cooling, the card hardly even becomes warm to touch despite ma.
overclocking
+ Gainward-certified overclocking through "Enhanced Mode"
+ ViVo which seldom is offered on lower priced cards
+ Incredible overclocking
Weaknesses:
– Price is too high considering
the price levels of competing products
– we would have liked to see at least one game included, but
that would probably have raised the price even further
We would like to thank Gainward for
making this review possible.
