Biggest nVidia scam yet

[time]

I just received a couple of Gainward MX440 video cards, or at least that's how they were described.

Imagine my shock when examining one of the boxes and reading: "64MB SDR"

Disbelief reigned (surely Gainward knows what it's doing?), so I tried one in an Athlon 2000.

*&!@#!$%%!!!!

3DMark 2001 throws up an unbelievably poor score of 2266. This compares with 6243 for a real MX 440 with DDR-SDRAM.

That's 36% folks, or roughly one third of the freaking performance!

3DMark 2000 says 2423 vs 8116 (32-bit), or 30%.

At default clock speeds, I'd expect to see at least 4500 out of the cheaper (and older) MX400. So that's about 50% of the performance of the previous generation ...

Closer examination of the packaging reveals that this is an MX440-SE. The card is a "Lite". :evil:

Surely nVidia (and Gainward, and my supplier) has surpassed themselves. An unknown chip variant that redefines the meaning of the word "crippled" with only one third of the expected performance and with just a two-letter suffix ("Special Edition"?) to distinguish it as an abomination from the pits of Hell.

BTW, the price seemed about right for a true MX440. :boom:

Tomorrow, I will be begging the supplier to enlighten me as to why I have just paid more for an inferior product that couldn't suck the skin off a rice pudding.

I think this is the end of my relationship with nVidia video cards (and I'm looking with suspicion at the nForce board here now). I've been agonizing over whether to switch to ATI stuff, and this really is the last straw.

 

[Mercutio]

Just thought I'd say that I had NOTHING to do with this rant.
Just to be the voice of reason.... is gainward the only company selling SDRam GF4MXs? I'd rather hang one company than a chipset manufacturer...

 

[time]

... is gainward the only company selling SDRam GF4MXs?

No. :x

 

[Cliptin]

Nvidia's website does specify a:

GeForce4 MX 440-SE
                         Fill Rate: 1 Billion Texels/Sec.
                         Triangles per Second:31 Million
                         Memory Bandwidth: 5.3GB/Sec.
                         Maximum Memory: 64MB

which has better specs than the GeForce4 MX 420.

So it does look like obfuscation on the chip manu. level. I don't like the SE specification either as usually that moniker is reserved for an up-bump.

 

[Tannin]

The SE is supposed to have slightly lower specs. So far as I know, it isn't supposed to be SDRAM based. I think that's just a particular manufacturer's cheapskate ways. But I better look into it and make sure! We have quite a few SEs in stock: if they are using SDRAM I'm going to be calling a couple of suppliers and tearing some new arseholes in them.

Switch to ATI? Yike. Time, don't do it!

Just today we had about the third of a series of video card related problem machines come in. Not one of our machines. The usual symptoms: game won't work. The cause? ATI. Guy "upgraded" his TNT M64 to a Radeon. Now his favourite game doesn't work anymore. We are seeing quite a bit of it.

Here is another one: twice now (possibly three times - I'd have to check with Kristi) we have been doing Windows 2000 installations (always 2000? or was one XP?) only to get a blank-screen crash. Format, try again. Fiddle about for ages, suspecting everything. The culprit, of course, was the ATI video board. What you have to do is remove the ATI card, install with something else (a Gforce or whatever else is handy) and, when the install is complete, then swap in the ATI.

I was more-or-less planning to add ATI to our "it is OK to sell these" list about this time, seeing as quite a few of you guys say they are OK now. But looking at the number of problematic ATI-equipped machines we are getting coming in lately, I've just about changed my mind.

I like stuff that works.

 

[Buck]

I find it amazing at the different stories we report on this forum, I suppose that is the beauty of this place. The problem that Tannin explained with ATI I just had with nVidia. It was a Ti4600 and Windows XP installation. I removed the nVidia card, put in a ATI Rage Pro temporarily, went through the installation of XP, the motherboard drivers, and ran the XP updates. Then I put in the Ti card, and viola, all was good. I didn't sell the customer any of the hardware, I was just the XP installation person. But then again, I've had problems with ATI cards under NT 4.0.

 

[LiamC]

I'd be really interested to see what CPU & chipset these things are happening with.

Buck says one thing, Tannin another, Mercutio etc. My line of thinking goes something like this. Each one of you system builders probably has a favourite combo of components - CPU/mobo/RAM/Vid.

What I am starting to think is perhaps it's not an NVIDIA/ATi thing per se, but an ATi with VIA chipset, or NVIDIA with SiS etc. You guys want to post?

It would also be good to post the chipset on the "problem" boards/returns.

 

[Mercutio]

I always use Via chipsets. I almost always use ATI cards.

HOWEVER: my negative experiences are by and large from computers I did not build. I've seen Dells with crappy nvidia cards in them, HP machines, beigeboxes with PC Chips boards... I don't see any commonality there.

If nothing else, I've seen goodly numbers of $$$ (HP, Gateway, Compaq, IBM. No idea what Dell puts in its servers) servers with ATI cards in them, usually lowend Rage-something based graphics chips. If ATI didn't have its shit together for those $15,000+ machines, those cards would *not* be there.

 

[Jan Kivar]

If nothing else, I've seen goodly numbers of $$$ (HP, Gateway, Compaq, IBM. No idea what Dell puts in its servers) servers with ATI cards in them, usually lowend Rage-something based graphics chips. If ATI didn't have its shit together for those $15,000+ machines, those cards would *not* be there.

Usually the "Rage II" chips are integrated to the boards. I don't know why they are ATI. Maybe ATI has a warehouse full of 'em... :wink:

Jan

 

[Howell]

I have seen lots and lots of Dell Optiplexs with Nvidia M64s in them.

 

[blakerwry]

bah, video cards suck, eh? we should get another output device.... but for now I am going to go back to the trusty printer for all my ouput needs...

 

[Buck]

bah, video cards suck, eh? we should get another output device.... but for now I am going to go back to the trusty printer for all my ouput needs...

What's the refresh rate on that Blake?

 

[zx]

Asus also has a similar product.

http://usa.asus.com/products/vga/v8170se/overview.htm

 

[mangyDOG]

3DMark 2000 says 2423 vs 8116 (32-bit), or 30%.

At default clock speeds, I'd expect to see at least 4500 out of the cheaper (and older) MX400.

I have sold a few PC's using the GeF4 MX440-SE chipset and these have used DDR memory but with a 64bit instead of 128bit memory interface. They pulled about 5000 in 3D mark with Athlon1800+ processor which I though was OK. I only use them in really "office" systems where the customer might play doom or UT occasionally...

 

[Onomatopoeic]

Many modern server mobos use the old ATI Rage graphics chipset (Rage = late '90s), because it's inexpensive and provides a decent level of GUI performance for a AGP 1x/PCI-based graphics chipset. Matrox's G-200 and G-450 chipset also supports PCI, but I would suspect they are not at all price-competitive in the volume-oriented OEM chipset market. I would also suspect that ATI's OEM sales department has aggressively pushed this Cash Cow graphics chipset to every server mobo manufacturer.

 

[blakerwry]

bah, video cards suck, eh? we should get another output device.... but for now I am going to go back to the trusty printer for all my ouput needs...

What's the refresh rate on that Blake?

i dont know.. all the pop-up ads and junk webpages are making me have to run to target to get more ink cartridges... If I shrink the screen down so I can get 4 screenshots per sheet of paper.... maybe I can get .0167Hz

 

[blakerwry]

btw, the title of this thread is really misleading.... and loaded... there ofcourse is no "scam" on Nvidia's part.

They are phasing out the geforce 3's and now the 2's... All their products will become geforce4's or better... this is jsut for name recognition... additionally, 'SE' has meant alot of things... "special edition" being just one of the meanings... sometimes it means that you are getting a "lite" version.

If your retailer is selling you one product but giving you another then the "scam" is entirely theirs.

 

[time]

I've now realized that I've used the SE variant before and not been reduced to fits of Rage. (sorry ) The SE seems to be slower, but the real problem is the SDRAM. Given that the memory interface (and the card) is an nVidia design, I'd strongly suspect that all SDRAM versions of the MX440 suck hard.

It's so bad, I wonder if the memory interface is really 128-bit? I fiddled with clock settings up to 330/190MHz, but this was unstable. I think the default memory clock is 130MHz.

3DMark 2000   ATI7000/DDR  MX440-SE/SDR  MX440-SE/DDR  MX440/DDR
  16-bit         3399          3753          8445          9083
  32-bit         2374          2423          6780          8116
3DMark 2001
  32-bit         2220          2266          5275          6243

The Radeon 7000 is a Sapphire, the MX440-SE/DDR an HIS (Hightech), and the true MX440 a Gainward Golden Sample (default clock). The HIS cost less than the MX440-SE/SDR (also Gainward) and people should be pleased to know that both incarnations of the SE come with passive cooling (no fans).

BTW, the Radeon picked up about 10% by replacing the included drivers with Catalyst 3.1. However, the 3D quality doesn't look to be as good as the MX440 products. And given that I'd expect a good MX400 to score 4500 in 16-bit 3DMark 2000, I'm afraid I think Merc's claim that ATI 7000 is slightly faster than MX400 to be rather optimistic.

I don't know if they've dreamt up ways to cripple the MX400 ...

Conclusions

The Radeon 7000 is certainly faster than an M64, but still so slow that I can't see anyone here using it for anything other than 2D work. Therefore the M64 is probably a better buy (up to 1024x768 2D at least).

In 16-bit and older games, the MX400 may be a better buy than the Radeon 7000.

MX440-SE/DDR is still the best compromise for most people (at least until Radeon 9000 lobs in at a better price). That's based on 2nd tier solutions like HIS.

MX440-SE/SDR is the biggest scam yet from nVidia (and any manufacturers who choose to use it).

 

[CougTek]

time,

You should try to grab a cheap OEM version of the ATI Radeon 7500 64MB DDR (not the 7500LE, which is SDR). Here I can get one for 89$CDN, which means that you should be able to get it for ~100-110AU$. At that price, I'm sure it should give pretty competitive scores in 3DMarks against your other contenders.

 

[Mercutio]

zx: "Kittens give Morbo gas."

I said the 7000 is faster than the GF4MX? Huh. Usually I'm pretty careful in saying 7x00. There are 7200 and 7500 models as well.