Hardware question: GeForce 4 MX440 vs GeForce FX5200

[joe.pelayo]

Hello everybody.

Today I received as a gift a 5 years old Gateway 500X CPU which is apparently dead due to a faulty motherboard (I still have to troubleshoot it, of course).

Even in the cause I can fix it, odds are I'll prefer to make the aforementioned CPU a donor for my other machines, instead of resurrecting an old Pentium 4 (no HT) system. Being this the case I checked the parts for possible transplants:

512MB DDR PC2700 memory module (useful right off the shelf for my main desktop system).
120GB Maxtor IDE hard drive (also useful, assuming it is in working order).
128MB AGP8X NVIDIA GeForce4 MX440 graphics card.

On this last part (the graphics card) I have my doubts as of where to use it. My main desktop system already has an NVIDIA card: FX5200, 128MB, which is newer. The thing is that I've been doing some homework comparing both the MX440 and the FX5200 and get mixed opinions: for one thing the FX5200 is the latest of the two with some advantages like support for a later DirectX (which for Linux is pointless) and other things, but the FX5200 is also reported to be technically inferior to the MX440.

In your opinion/experience which card is a better performer? Should I expect a performance gain if I were to replace the FX5200 with the MX440?

Thanks,
Joe.

[skolnick]

Try them both and decide for yourself. For games, I think the FX5200 will give slighty lower performance than the MX440, but I have no clue if gaming is important for you or not.

Regards.

[bbfuller]

Hello Joe,

I've got a couple of FX5200's in use at the present time. With the proprietary nvidia driver they are quite capable of 3D effects in the KDE desktop.

I've also got a couple of MX440's in the spares box and I'm sure that I relegated them there because they were no longer supported by the nvidia driver and therefore had to run with the nouveau driver which didn't give me 3D at the time.

I'm not sure if that is the case with the current nouveau.

Looking at the cards, the 440 is definitely the lighter weight - and that's usually a fairly reliable indicator - and I'm sure of an earlier date.

In fact, here's the comparison:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compari...ocessing_units

[joe.pelayo]

Hi guys,

For one thing gaming is not important for me (I only play Tetravex and the Battle for Wesnoth, but I guess they are not that power hungry), but the lack of support by the NVIDIA driver might be a deal breaker. I'll have to try both cards.

I was aware of that chart, in fact it was there where I saw that there were some technical details the MX triumphed over the FX.

In any event I have another machine which currently has a SiS graphics card, that one will definitely become a winner with either card.

Thanks,
Joe.

[bbfuller]

Hello Joe,

You have to be careful with specifications like that.

If you are not careful you can end up arguing that a 2.6GHz AMD K6-2 processor is better than one of the recent single core Celeron's running at 2GHz or less.

I think the thing to remember is that the MX440 is an older architecture which is why it used to be supported by the nvidia legacy driver while the FX series is supported by one of the current drivers and is more up to date all round.

Still, if, like me, you are not interested in power hungry games then I have no doubt that either will do a good job.