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After
having a nice chat with our friends from XFX Graphics in our exclusive
interview (I know, cheap plug), we sat down with the XFX GeForce4
MX420 video card. This card's street price is in and around the $99 mark,
making it a "value" card, not necessarily intended to be a total
super-duper replacement for your existing card. The best and most practical
use of this card is for gamers on a budget (getting a top of the line
Ti4600 at $400 seriously segments the buying public), those wanting to
upgrade an existing card, and for those in need of a decent card at a
great price.
The numbers
on the XFX GeForce4 MX420 are somewhat impressive, especially when you
consider the cost to performance ratio, sporting a 250 MHz core clock
speed. The funny thing is that the MX440 models run at 270 to 275 MHz,
which can easily be achieved with the MX420 with overclocking, and the
right cooling solution for your video card. However, the MX440 has a 128bit
memory path whereas the MX420 has a 64-bit path which effects the performance.
SPECIFICATIONS
/ FEATURES
Monitor
& Display support
- D-shell
(15-pin) VGA connector
- Register
compatible with VGA
- TV
out Module enabling big-screen gaming, digital timeshifting VCR, and
video-editing applications
Features
- nView
Display Technology
- Libit
DDR Frame Buffer Memory ghtspeed Memory Architecture (LMA) II Technology
- 64MB
128-MX Memory Crossbar
- Integrated
Dual 350MHz Dac’s
- Integrated
Dual-Channel TMDS Transmitter
- Integrated
TV Encoder Supporting 1024X768 Resolution
- Accuview
Antialiasing
- Video
Processing Engine (VPE)
- AGP
4X with AGP Texturing and Fast Writes
- Highest
Quality and Highest Performance Microsoft Windows XP Support
- Unified
Driver Architecture (UDA)
- Microsof
DirectX Optimizations and Support
- Complete
OpenGL 1.3 and OpenGL support
- 2
year warranty
- S-video
cable included
- XFX
Driver Disk, Full version of PowerDVD XP, Demo editions of Gunlok and
Dronez (games)
And for
the specifics of the XFX GeForce4 MX420 against some other cards...
| |
Core
Clock / RAM MHz |
Memory
Bandwidth |
Fill
rate Mpixels/sec |
Triangles
per second |
Asus
GeForce2 GTS
|
200
/ 333 |
5.3
GB/s |
800 |
25
Million |
GeForce3
Ti500
|
240
/ 500 |
8.0
GB/s |
960 |
40
Million |
| XFX
GeForce4 MX420 |
250
/ 332 |
2.7
GB/s |
1000 |
31
Million |
Instead of seeing the
performance of the card on our a top flight system, an AMD 1900+ XP, etc
etc, we thought to put the card in one of our middle-to-lower end computers,
a PIII 600MHz. We did this because the best application of this card would
be to upgrade an older system, or to improve the performance on an existing
machine. An example of a great practical use of this card would be to upgrade
a "boxed" system such as a Dell or Gateway, that originally came
with a RivaTNT2 chipset which is woefully outdated. Anyway, chances are
if you can afford an AMD 1900XP+ system, you could afford a higher end card.
So, that's the thinking behind this "real world" simulation for
testing out this card.
Test System Specifications:
- PentiumIII 600 MHz
- 512 MB RAM
- Abit VT6X4 Motherboard
- Windows XP
- nVidia detonator drivers, version 28.32
We took the existing
card in the test system, an ASUS GeForce2 GTS card as well as the XFX GeForce4
MX420 card and ran it through the following benchmarking utilities:
- 3D Mark 2001
- Vulpine GLmark
- Comanche 4 Benchmark Demo
- nVidia Chameleon Benchmark Utility
Needless to say the numbers that we got were somewhat surprising. In the
3DMark2001 program, the numbers were pretty similar, however, the XFX GeForce4
MX420 actually won out against the GeForce2 GTS!
3DMark2001 SCORES
| |
3DMark
Score |
Car
Chase High |
Dragonothic
High |
Lobby
High |
| Asus
GeForce2 GTS |
2546 |
11.4
FPS |
21.3
FPS |
21.6
FPS |
| XFX
GeForce4 MX420 |
2677 |
14.6
FPS |
22.9
FPS |
22.8
FPS |
The difference in overall scores is a respectable 133 points! Those 133
points equal a 5.14% increase in an overall performance benchmark. Not bad
for a card that doesn't hit the three digit dollar figure!
Next we ran through the popular Comanche 4 Benchmark Demo. We ran through
three different runs, on 800x600, 1024x768, and 1280x1024 resolution levels.
Again, we're talking razor thin margins on the performance difference. The
Benchmark demo is a DirectX 8.1 benchmark that represents a real-world gaming
experience. It measures a given system's performance in frames per second
and Tris per second (more is better).
Comanche 4 Benchmark Demo
| |
800x600 |
1024x768 |
1280x1024 |
Asus
GeForce2 GTS |
14.78
FPS /
2.928M Tris Per Sec |
13.22
FPS /
2.618M Tris Per Sec |
10.65
FPS /
2.110M Tris Per Sec |
XFX
GeForce4 MX420 |
14.95
FPS /
2.961M Tris Per Sec |
14.96
FPS /
2.963M Tris Per Sec |
13.73
FPS /
2.719M Tris Per Sec |
As you
can see in this real world gaming test of a Direct X 8.1 environment,
the XFX GeForce4 outperforms the older card. Most notably impressive is
the 1280x1024 mode, where there's a 28.9% difference in performance in
the FPS benchmark. In this "real world" gaming test, the obvious
choice is the XFX GeForce4 MX420.
Vulpine
GLmark Test
While
MadOnion specializes in DirectX benchmarks, Vulpine has chosen to build
its GLMark software package upon the powerful OpenGL platform. The base
rendering routine is a custom version of Vulpine's next-generation game
engine known as Vision. While a current generation video card is recommended,
this benchmark only requires an OpenGL card with true ARB_mutlitexturing
support according to the minimum specifications. This means most cards
produced since the original nVidia TNT or 3dfx Voodoo3 should be capable
of running GLMark, though do not expect anything more than a few frames
per second with such dated video chipsets. We set the Vulpine GLMark test
to an 800x600 resolution level.
Results of the XFX MX420 tests...
The GeForce2 GTS outperformed
the MX420 in the OpenGL test, scoring an Average fps of 29.6. Interesting,
because in the other two major benchmarking utilities, the results were
extremely close, with the XFX GeForce4 MX420 winning out.
On
to Page 2 / 2 - More Benchmarks, Overclocking, and Final Results!
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