NVIDIA's Forgotten MX4000…

[@BudgetBuildsOfficial]

This weeks video was a bit of a smaller project...As originally we were meant to be looking at the last ever British GPU (which Nvidia sneakily managed to get rid off) however the card has major issues with the SIS Chipset and Via Combo in our AGP Benchmark PC...So we are going to have to build another system capable of dealing with the card. So let me know if you'd like us to do a video on "The Ultimate AGP PC" as I have started importing parts ready for it. Also dont worry the other bigger video is still in the works it may just take a little while longer to get around to it. Anyways I hope you all enjoyed the pain that was Nvidia's MX4000 GPU.

[@woldemunster9244]

What the heck is wrong with your voice over? Cool glitch effect anyhoo. :D

[@woldemunster9244]

Seems to fix itself half way thru.

[@ragnarsdad6065]

For the ultimate AGP PC i guess Core 2 Quad with a hd3850.

[@tqrules01]

wait is that a Castrol mug? I.E the BP sub brand for the Lubricants?

[@s0men00bb]

Yes please , The Ultimate AGP PC would be great. Also , during UT play , your voice was cutting off and skipping words , I guess it was compression issue.

[@Zephyr-Harrier]

13:42 I don't think its intentional but the audio glitches are very fitting for this card review lol. "Unreal two thous- real- two three e e" lol

[@BudgetBuildsOfficial]

Disabling KZbin audio equalisation seems to fix this.

[@Echomemes]

​@@BudgetBuildsOfficial I think you can't do that on mobile :( the only audio setting is "Stable volume" which I guess is an implementation of ReplayGain, but it's already off

[@johnbailey614]

​@@BudgetBuildsOfficialstill have the audio issue after turning off in additional settings in mobile and force closing the app fyi

[@dyter424]

Oh yes, playing Unreal Two thous-real3eeD in x440x40xT is truly the best gaming experience one can ever have, so there is.

[@subg9165]

@@BudgetBuildsOfficial doesn't seem to fix it for me

[@baroncalamityplus]

At 13:45 there is a significant amount of vocal stuttering. So just like the card being reviewed!

[@jimmymyers]

I thought my phone was overheating, glad it isn't a just me issue

[@drakethedragon457]

If you phone overheated it would just switch off

[@tim3172]

@@jimmymyers Phones use an ASIC for playing back video (Apple Media engine, Qualcomm Multimedia Processor, etc.) They... don't overheat when playing it back. That's not how anything works. If they used the general purpose CPU cores, your phone would last like 30 minutes in video playback mode.

[@ChrisTian-sd5yq]

ayoo

[@dascandy]

Note how the background music plays smoothly. It's intentional.

[@LiquidCooledListerine]

Ah yes, the MX4000. The ORIGINAL NVIDIA scam card, even earlier than one of those "fake" 1060 cards on AliExpress and Wish.

[@drewnewby]

Hey, at least the MX 4000 had DDR. The GeForce4 MX 420 had half the SDR of the GeForce2 MX it was made from.

[@Lady_Zenith]

The real original one was TNT2 M64. So many people bough that based on the 32MB of VRAM, they thought they were getting the real TNT2, but got gutted 64-bit card. My father back in the day bought it thinking he was upgrading from Voodoo Banshee, while in most situations it was a downgrade. And Nvidia got away with it. M64 sold like hot cakes, so the trend continued.

[@johncate9541]

@@Lady_Zenith I wondered when someone would mention the M64! Total piece of crap. The Banshee wasn't much better, but at least you could use GLide with that, and that was 3dfx' second redheaded stepchild (after Voodoo Rush) and not Nvidia's.

[@Lady_Zenith]

@@johncate9541 Yeah and the banshee had better 16-bit rendering (Nvidia had that weird checkerboard pattern on alpha blending) and unlike the M64 it did not crash the system to BSOD once in a while cause it had a crappy VIA chipset under it. Banshee was not the fastest but at least it had 0 problem.

[@dascandy]

@@drewnewby I was expecting this to be on the MX420 which was trash when it was first announced.

[@SMTahmid]

My first PC had this card. When Prince of Persia: Sands of time hit me with the "you need minimum shader 2.0" message I finally realized just how shit this card actually was.

[@insertfunnynamehere1256]

I'm sorry you had this card for your first pc

[@sandrinowitschM]

​@@insertfunnynamehere1256for real. This abomination of a card could've driven them right back to consoles.

[@IgorBozoki1989]

Same. And i could play WW and T2T

[@Baulder13]

Tried playing WoW with this piece of garbage. I couldn't see NPCs or mobs until I was just about on top of them. Tried running into Ironforge and my entire PC locked up and I could no longer log into that character. He was just stuck there because my computer could not load Ironforge and would just crash.

[@SMTahmid]

Unfortunately I had to stick with these junk cards (someone gave me a FX5200, ik ik from one shitpile to another) till I got a job after highschool and then built a rig with a 550ti.

[@markdaga1711]

Their biggest scam card IMO was the GT1030 that secretly had DDR4 RAM, while the 'decent' 1030 variant had GDDR5. That's right, not GDDR4. DDR4. System RAM. I bought it for a hackintosh I built for my dad, so we could play the odd game together, and it ended up having at most 40% of the performance of the already anemic GT1030. It rendered Mac OS just fine, though, but still. DDR on a GPU is wild. EDIT: OK I watched the video this one is worse.

[@scaniadan2968]

The ddr4 1030 Is ass too you have a point lol

[@bonnome2]

That also downgraded the RTX 4070 gddr6x to gddr6 and not give any samples to reviewers so it won't get covered in the media. They are still doing it

[@luheartswarm4573]

When i built my computer years ago, on a paper thin budget i fell for the 1030 scam Jesus christ my ryzen igpu did twice better in games!

[@federicocatelli8785]

970 with less vram

[@SiliconExarch]

​@@federicocatelli8785except it did have 4GB VRAM, the implementation was just the GPU equivalent of putting 3 sticks of ram in a dual channel board with 4 slots.

[@daemonspudguy]

I didn't even know that Half-Life 2 (and the Source engine in general) could be knocked all the way down to DirectX 7.

[@lukasgroot]

Makes sense, DX7 to DX9 wasn't as long of a time span as let's say DX10 to DX12.

[@classic_jam]

Only in early builds of the engine.

[@fagear]

I've run HL2 on Riva TNT2. It was like frame in 10 seconds and looked terrible, but still worked.

[@krz8888888]

That’s how I played it originally on a geforce 4 mx 420, which is a fast geforce 2

[@bloeckmoep]

@@krz8888888 : That depends on which geforce 2 you're comparing it to. But in general, the NV11 beats the NV17/18 in terms of performance just because the NV11 has 2 piplines and 4 texture mappers vs 2 by 2. The slight overclock of the geforce 4 mx lineup does not make up for 2 missing tmus and more frame buffer or bandwith isn't helping that anemic chip either. And in terms of proper GF2 with NV15, it can outperform some of the NV25/28 card combinations and every NV17/18, the NV15 is only losing to the giant amount of frame buffer most NV25/28 cards come with and the caked in dx8 feature set. Story would be very interesting if NV15 would've come with 128MB fb.

[@danthompsett2894]

Usually people buy graphics cards for the graphics card not the cardboard box but in this case, the cardboard box has more appeal, artistray and usefullness than the card inside the box.

[@ChrisTian-sd5yq]

ayooo

[@HappyBeezerStudios]

A collectors item that MX 4000

[@NexusFantismo]

Budget Builds uploading at high volume. It's a gift.

[@ZeebieZebra]

I remember owning one of these things. I aquired mine, because it came with a copy of Doom 3 and at the time my PC didnt have a graphics card that could run Doom 3. The MX4000 could barely run Doom 3 from memory. To be fair the only thing I loved about this card was in COD2 (I think it was cod2) there was a trench map with smoke and it couldnt render the smoke and it gave a massive pvp advantage on that map.

[@SuperSlipDiff]

One of those moments when low graphics help the player lol

[@Carstuff111]

I got my hands on a GeForce MX4000 for free when some friends threw together a bunch of parts to help me get into PC gaming. Thankfully, a few months later I ended up with a full system upgrade including a heavily overclocked Sapphire branded ATi Radeon 9800 Pro. I suddenly went from barely able to play Medal of Honor: Allied Assault on low settings 800x600 with decent frame rates, to hundreds of frames per second with everything maxed out at high resolutions. I do miss the Radeon 9800 Pro, I do not miss that MX4000, to the point I barely remember it.

[@DevilbyMoonlight]

the 9800 like the earlier 9700 pro cards were top tier cards and had them for years. I had them in my own lan party machines

[@Baulder13]

I had this friggen thing. Got ripped off by my local PC builder. Traded in my dads beast of a machine after he passed away and his PC broke. The guy ripped off my mom and built me a piece of shit pentium III, 128mb or RAM and a shitty MX 4000 PCI card. Screw that guy ripping off an 11 year old kid and a newly widowed mother. This was in early 2005. Learned to build my own PC after that experience.

[@JulienBertozzi]

This story begs for some payback

[@leonidas14775]

To top it off, its an AGP card. So you can't stick it in an empty PCI slot for a second monitor and put a decent card in your only AGP slot lol.

[@DrasticPaladin]

I remember buying one of these at a computer show thinking it was better than my geforce 3. Very important lesson to do my research before buying parts. Because it was impossible to return parts to these shows since they were around one Saturday every month and vendors didn't do returns, and sometimes even weren't there the next month!

[@AlistairBrugsch]

I miss those fairs. Absolute rip off merchants mostly... There was always one vendor running a rig with a full clear perspex case and a billion LED fans. Usually with the crappiest deals going

[@scotty1604876]

@@AlistairBrugsch Went to one of those when i was 15 with a pocket full of cash i had saved up. First pc build/upgrade i tried on my own. Wanted to upgrade to the new AMD 2000/2600+, I needed a mobo cpu and ram. came across this seller displaying "pro2000+" mobo's with a free cpu and free 256mb ram for £129. (cpu alone was that price at the time if i remember). Me not paying attention and like a moth to a flame with the price i bought it no questions asked thinking i got a great deal... installed it into my computer and fired up 3dmark2001, WTH! 500 points lower than my old system. After a week of me pressing buttons and not really knowing what i was doing i took it to the local PC shop/repair. Turns out it was a duron overclocked to 1.2ghz and it gets better, both CPU and RAM were soldered onto the board 🤣. Went back the following month to return it, guess what guy not there 😑. Lesson learnt that day, research research research! Glad it was on a low cash figure. (didnt seem like it at the time though) Happy ending, became great friends with the Local Pc shop owner Martin and his apprentice Louis. Going to Lan parties he would setup in the shop and matching the online price for anything i wanted. He's retired now, become very wealthy on bitcoin/ethereum, biggest regret not listening to him on that one. Especially eth. after seeing bitcoin go nuts! Still winds me up about that damn mobo though to this day... 🥲 EDIT: Found the mobo in question if anyone wants a laugh. theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/pcchips-m810l-9-0m#docs

[@anondude504]

The Unreal Tournament 2003 segment has sound issues

[@CMDRSweeper]

It came from the graphics card in question... It spreads itself to modern hardware.

[@tammi8808]

Because he recorded it on this 4090 from 2005. It was the best back in the days 🥰

[@daemonspudguy]

"not the worst thing in the world" Glowing endorsement!

[@GKSchattenjaeger]

I am happy to have discovered this channel recently, so much tech nostalgia, it's awesome. I've been engrossed into gaming and gaming tech since early 90ies and seeing all these cards and such is a trip down memory lane.

[@fungo6631]

The GeForce 2 and derivatives are actually partially DX 8.0 compatible thanks to the NSR, a primitive pixel shader. Doom 3 takes advantage of it to get proper Doom 3 lighting, but most games didn't take advantage of it.

[@SiliconExarch]

It's still a bit misleading to say they are DX8 compatible IMO since said features were only available through vendor-specific OpenGL extensions.

[@HappyBeezerStudios]

Too be fair, I've seen Doom 3 run on a Voodoo 2

[@fungo6631]

@@HappyBeezerStudios That's irrelevant, as it looked like dogshit. Doom 3 looks like Doom 3 on the GeForce 2 and derivatives, with its fancy lighting.

[@Δημήτρης-θ7θ]

@@HappyBeezerStudios Not the official game, you have to mod it.

[@casultaser]

13:42 sounds like a classic YTP and I love it

[@johnroberts2905]

Unsure if the audio glitches from around 14:00 are intentional or not.... 🤣 Could be the GPU.

[@zachsilby4569]

thank fuck you mentioned this, i thought my new headphones were broken

[@dikbozo]

well, there goes the fine memories that had supplanted my time with a couple of MX cards. Curse you red headed baron. BTW you did not disappoint, your 'Race to The Bottom' series here is intriguing.

[@alensabanovic747]

This card definitely existed. Back around 2005, I was searching for a 64MB card to "upgrade" my poor celeron PC. I ended up with MX4000. Playin heavily modded GTA Vice City on it... it burned out... Two of them. If I remember correctly their main drawback was memory bus.

[@mruczyslaw50]

So Vice City did run, but in this video it doesn't. Starting to think the latest drivers have to be terrible because it should work fine.

[@alensabanovic747]

@@mruczyslaw50 It definitely ran on it. And since It replaced my integrated intel 810 motherboard graphics abomination I even thought it ran good 🤣 It was an MSI model with clunky passive cooler. They got really hot.... and dead in the end.

[@jericosangbaan4688]

@@alensabanovic747 lmao intel 810 graphics abomination omg lol

[@aleksazunjic9672]

I had it around the same time 😁But I newer tried to play anything "modern" on it, only games released up to 2001 , so I was quite satisfied with my used purchase.

[@Johny40Se7en]

When I started playing games on a "computer", I used a crappy old Celeron laptop with onboard graphics, even that would run C&C Generals better than that...

[@thiazine]

Its awesome to see you are using crt monitors on your videos now. Its so nostalgic

[@Xaltar_]

Yup, now this I would 100% call a scam card (but a vendor scam not a board partner scam). The GF 4 MX460/440/420 cards were already pretty bad, particularly the 32 bit versions, with the lies, deliberate misnaming and lacking DX support but the MX 4000 took it to a whole new level of scam. I am pretty sure some SiS based scam GPUs actually had better DX support and in some titles even ran better. Horrible cards that existed solely for people to be able to slap an "Nvidia Geforce" sticker on their system (mostly system builders looking to trick people into paying more for garbage). Genuinely a steaming pile of poo.

[@HappyBeezerStudios]

I would go so far to say the MX460 was a decent budget card. No support for DX8, but at the right price it performed okay.

[@Trikipum]

the 440 was an ok card for dx7. I remember using it to play battlefield 1942 and it ran pretty well....

[@TheSwiftFX]

Great video as always! Lots of audio glitches during the Unreal Tournament segment for me too.

[@Snufflegrunt]

It coming off the market around 2006 implies that Vista’s requirements are what killed it off lol

[@Snufflegrunt]

@ApeStimplair-et9yk good for you mate lol

[@AlistairBrugsch]

I had a GF2 MX200 from Inno 3D and for such a low end card it overclocked to like nearly 100%

[@BudgetBuildsOfficial]

This one runs hot out of the gate.

[@sandrinowitschM]

I may be wrong but I remember the GeForce 2 MX series to have actually been a pretty good deal at the time. Offering performance on roughly the same level as the GeForce 256. The scamming started when they released the 4 MX that was actually still was the 2 MX.

[@tyaty]

@@sandrinowitschM GeForce 2 MX 200/400 were well-priced cards, indeed.

[@AlistairBrugsch]

@@sandrinowitschM yeah for sure, GF2 MX was a proper decent budget set of cards. But once the GF4 4xxx series came about, rebranding MX cards to be "GF4" was straight up dishonest. At least the reviewers of the time called them out on it and Guru3D was absolutely Indisposable for cutting through all that

[@patchouli3422]

13:14 At least this card can recreate the Morrowind Xbox port experience.

[@federicocatelli8785]

It's better on xbox

[@novash653]

A 32 bit memory bus? I thought 64bit was the lowest for graphics cards, you learn something new everyday.

[@danielstovell3764]

They're rare but still exist! The most modern one I know of is the RX 6300. I also had an ASUS HD 5450 from a joblot which had 512MB 32-bit memory

[@DanielCardei]

GT710-SL-1GD5-BRK

[@RowanBird779]

I had a motherboard with a ATI laptop chip with a 32bit memory bus (according to GPU-Z, that is). I forget what exactly it was though.

[@ZERARCHIVE2023]

Wait for the 8 bit ones

[@tezcanaslan2877]

@@ZERARCHIVE2023 there probably are some vintage GPU’s with that

[@anthonyyoung9810]

Back in the day my best mate had the awesome MX440 whilst I opted for the TI 4200. The difference was night and day. Awesome content mate, keep it up!

[@nep-nep6575]

There is one thing that these are useful for: the PCI version is actually quite competent for DOS and win9x. The drivers also aren’t very heavy on the CPU, so you can pair it with something like a Pentium MMX-200/233. Which most of those were paired with ATI Rages and Nvidia Riva’s. In that case, the MX4000 is quite decent* especially since it’s much cheaper than a GeForce 256 or TNT2 Ultra, and supports Hardware T&L. *considering that it’s much newer than the ATI rage series and the Nvidia Riva/Vanta, that’s not saying much.

[@HappyBeezerStudios]

Wouldn't a PCI FX 5200 or MX440 also do the trick? Better performance, fully compatible and easier to find.

[@bobbobson1605]

@@HappyBeezerStudios FX 5200 seems to be a decent choice as well for PCI... seems like a pretty decent number of them available on eBay at the moment (28 vs 17 for MX 4000 vs 0 for MX 440.. though there is an MX 420 up there)

[@HappyBeezerStudios]

@@bobbobson1605 yeah, they exist in vast numbers. Typically from OEM stock. Put one in and say that you have the new GeForce FX technology in your prebuild ;) And while they aren't good at DX9, they are fine DX8 cards and compatible with lots of older games that use later depreciated tech like 8-bit palletized textures or table fog emulation.

[@RD-gaming-lab]

This exact 32 bit version was my first graphic card in 2004. GTA Vice City was working. I did not check fps (cause I did not know what it meant in 2004) but performance was bad. Probably, this card was one of the reasons why I became PC enthusiast because I wanted to be newer scammed again.

[@GalileoAV]

13:57 This is the real scam card experience, hilarious stuttering and everything

[@bloeckmoep]

Man, your video brings back nightmares of my prebuilt with an gf4 mx420. What a waste of perfectly good sand that was. With my first paycheck, that got yanked out and replaced with a proper 9800se 128mb.

[@HappyBeezerStudios]

The 9800 SE was such a weird card. Only 4 pipes like the midrange cards,

[@StranaHyena]

5:51 I appreciate the care and caution taken with this card XD

[@vojtechadame5860]

This is why the FX5200 shouldn't be called the worst GPU of early 2000s. The MX4000 is such a piece of s*it, it had simply nothing to offer. Obolete architecture, lack of DX8 or DX9 support, terrible performance...

[@felipekfcosta]

I had a 5200, it was an ok upgrade from the gf2 mx400 I previously had, if you managed your expectations. It allowed me to play the GTA 3 series

[@someguy3186]

From a modern perspective, the FX 5200 is at least fairly useful for a retro gaming rig thanks to its high compatibility with games from the 90s (including DOS). Pair it with a Voodoo 2 and you can play almost every game from that era. But the MX4000 seems like trash all around.

[@HappyBeezerStudios]

Exactly. The FX 5200 was horribly slow in DX9 (okay, all FX were) and the absolute lowest card of it's series. But it's DX8 support is great, performance there is fine, and since it was so cheap back then and every OEM threw them into their machines, they are readily available nowadays. If I hand't found a cheap OEM Geforce 3 Ti 200 and didn't already own a Radeon 8500 LE, 8200 Pro and 9600 Pro, I would probably grab one. Ar rather a 5200 Ultra if I can find one, or a 5600 if not.

[@DaSlaughterer]

Great vids as always , at 14;35 , the sound mucks up

[@matthewreynolds8025]

I just dug one of these cards out of my attic last weekend, along with another 2 cards mentioned in the vid, FX5200 and 8400GS. Also found a GT520, an ATI of some kind and an empty box for a HD6450. Currently building a Win98 PC.

[@dv7533]

I had a GeForce 2mx in 2001, with 64MB 64bit DDR. It was an OK budget card for the time. There were 32MB cards too, which was OK. Not much at the time used over 32MB of graphics ram. There were also 32bit cards and SDR cards, which were problematic already since the whole GeForce 2 range was memory bandwidth limited. The GeForce 4MX was the same architecture with a few optimizations to make it less sensitive to the lack of memory bandwidth, but if you then half the bus width you are still going to have terrible performance. Introducing such a card in 2003 is absolute madness and only good for getting rid of an old silicon surplus, but the price is outrageous for the performance and feature set. Right now I'm sporting a Chinese re-manufactured GTX750Ti with crazy fast RAM chips on it and even though it is very much down-volted to stay within about 30watts the RAM overclocks like crazy and the core overclocks a bit as well. No lack of graphics RAM bandwidth for me now.

[@another3997]

This is most likely an effort by some board manufacturers to use batches of 'faulty' silicon. By disabling or downgrading parts so they will at least run at a reduced level, the chip manufacturers get to recoup some cash, and board manufacturers get a bunch of cheap chips to sell on. NVIDIA probably didn't set out to make low performance parts, but wafer and chip fabrication are expensive and error prone endeavours. It's certainly common practice in the CPU world to disable faulty cores or reduce clock speeds etc.

[@HappyBeezerStudios]

I mean, it essentially a Geforce 4 MX440 SE with AGP 8x Halfway through the Geforce 4 cycle they updated all cards with AGP 8x, going so far as giving them new names. And that wasn't the only time they had a half gen update. SImilar happened with the Geforce FX (Replacing the 5600 with the 5700 and the 5800 with the 5900) and nowadays with the "Super" cards. Now the thing with the GF4 MX was, they were practically GF2 cards with a GF4 memory system and in some cases also higher clocks. And considering the core, it's a DirectX 7 card. And not just that but with a chip cut down to GF2 MX levels. The scammy part is that it ran in the same lineup with the big GF4 Ti cards. But there is a use case. It's a display adapter. It will give output to a monitor. And compared to the GF2 cards there are newer drivers and support on later OSes. The bad thing is, it was a display adapter even on release. Which means it isn't even an option for retro gaming. A Geforce 2 is stronger. A Geforce 3 is stronger. A Radeon 8500 is stronger. A Geforce 4 Ti is stronger. A Radeon 9200 or 9600 is stronger. A Geforce FX are stronger (even the FX 5200). All Radeon 9500/9700/9800 are stronger. There is no reason to get this card. Proper DX8 and 9 cards are available cheaply and for older pure DOS gaming there are more apropriate cards as well. Besides that those stronger newer cards also run them well.

[@SaarN1337]

I remember having an FX5200, and boy that thing sucked. At some point my PSU was starting to give me issues, the fan wouldn't spin and I had to manually give it an initial kick otherwise the PC wouldn't turn on, "sadly" my screwdriver got stuck and slipped and it shorted something and some caps exploded (I remember huge sparks flying out of the fan hole), and the only thing that died was the GPU if I'm not mistaken - so I then got a 6600GT, and that thing was sweet.

[@valipunctro]

I used an fx 5200 for about 3 years and it didnt die on me,funnily enough i recommended a 6600gt to a friend ( much wealthier friend) ,it more than twice the price i payed for the 5200. Although it was one of the cheapest 128bit ,and it had pixel shader 3 support, i think.

[@onetwomany5276]

The mx4000 memory bus rivals some of the low end graphics cards on the market today

[@PXAbstraction]

Lots of audio skipping during the UT2003 segment. Heard these in some other recent videos too. Not a big deal to me, but I thought you'd want to know.

[@JosephSmock-pt4lj]

"For a game that focuses so much on hiding in the shadows, I'm not too sure I can tell...what is a shadow." Quote of the year goes to Budget-Builds Official. It's official.

[@VsUK]

I remember buying one of these when it came out & I was fooled by the claims on the box. I at the time was running a system on a 3dfx Voodoo 1 & I needed something so I could play my games. And I was so excited as I needed an upgrade badly & I thought this would be it. And once installed, it some how felt worse. It was so bad, I eventually bought a used Radeon 9700 which felt so much faster. It in my view was a scam, as this was during the days sellers could advertise very misleading claims for products to sell.

[@Catonzo]

Mind you that this is a video for the MX4000, but I noticed that someone mentioned that this was essentially a MX440 rebranded. However I personally had quite GOOD experiences with the MX440. I remember vividly playing Anarchy Online on a 17" screen (Compaq CRT.. BEST god damn screen I have ever had. That color was so damn deep it made every game feel like a hug from Santa) and it ran easily 50 FPS with settings on higher... with 70-80 people on screen. It was a GOOD card. Overpriced one, but good. I cannot for the life of me remember what my next card was, but I am certain I had the MX440 until mid 2004 at minimum. A couple years. I played UT2003 on it quite well. I also remember playing Dungeon Siege 2 on it at a very acceptable level. For crying out loud, I played Gothic 2 on it at a better, smoother flowing rate than MODERN CARDS manage. Honestly to me feels like the MX440 was spat on for being a cheap, yet good alternative. The MX4000 seems nothing like this card. Not to mention that the MX440 had a fan.

[@TheExileFox]

the laptop cards MX150, MX250, MX350, MX450 are all pretty much just slight bumps in clocks of the 940MX, which itself is just a 940M with higher clocks. They're all crap. 940M was okay for light gaming when it was new.

[@DanielCardei]

What the frak? In 2005 you had legendary cards like the first 7800 GTX or the dual Bga 7950 GX2. The First Geforce 256 from `99 has better Memory Bus.

[@HappyBeezerStudios]

At that time the 6600 GT was also already out. And memory bus, well my old 8800 GT has double the memory bus of a brand new 4070 Ti and my current 1060 pulls even. Heck, a GT 420 has the same bus as a 4070 Ti

[@SerdceDanko]

Dude, 7800 gtx was priced at 600$.

[@HappyBeezerStudios]

@@SerdceDanko yeah, and that was the price of the flagship cards from there all the way to the 980 Ti, including cards like the 8800 Ultra, 9800 GTX+, GTX 295, GTX 480, GTX 590, GTX 680 and GTX 780 Ti

[@DarkepyonX]

MX series was popular on mid tier prebuilts by Dell, Gateway, Hp , Compaq etc etc etc here in US . There were 50 odd variations, I had a Chaintech that came with a big fan built in which was nice .

[@aleksazunjic9672]

I actually had that card for some time. I bought it used (2005, 2006 perhaps ...) , it was relatively inexpensive. By that time everybody knew it was sort of scam, well maybe not a scam but weaker than Geforce 2. In any case, I did play some older titles (20th century) with it, without much problem. Original Half-Life, expansion Opposing Force , European Air War., original Ghotic.Most demanding game was Soul Reaver 2 (from 2001), it did run reasonable well at 800x600 . Overall, I was quite satisfied with it, perhaps because I did not try anything newer (my computer was too weak for that anyway) . I don't know how original owner felt, tho 😁

[@raevod6361]

13:42 what happened here? haha the audio is glitchy

[@Troppa17]

Of course I remember the MX 4000. Had one out of an prebuild PC for testing back in the day. But it was one with the faster 64bit memory interface. Performance was more like a 'real' GeForce 4 MX while these 32bit memory interface cards were even slower than the original GeForce 2 MX aka GF 2 MX 200. Speaking on cards that not existed: There should be an GeForce PCX 4300 - a PCIe version of the MX 4000 very similar to the AGP card I had but never seen one in the wild.

[@giserson2]

I looked it up and there's even an PCIE version of this card released in 2004, the PCX 4300. So not only did they release this awful AGP card in 2003, they even decided that it would be a good idea to re-release it for PCIE systems in 2004. Like I would bet that there were barely any iGPUs on the market at that point that were worse that this card, yet they still did that.

[@wrlrdqueek]

I had a Geforce MX around 2003, in one of those compaqs too. My Compaq didn't have an AGP slot, so I had the PCI version of the card. It ran ok for the older games I was playing at the time. Neverwinter Nights ran fine.

[@MrKillswitch88]

I still remember the older Vanta era cards that were for the time horrendous.

[@Nebula_Protogen752]

14:34 your audio was glitched up and garbled here?

[@dan_loup]

I had one of those, but mine in particular had a little trick under it's sleeve, that was that you could overclock the hell out of the memory until it was useable.

[@HappyBeezerStudios]

Had the same experience with my 7300 GT, got it to run stable at 640 MHz chip 440 MHz memory, up from it's default 400 MHz on both. Not many cards that can run a stable 60% overclock.

[@lemagreengreen]

Very interesting, I don't remember this at all! I do remember the Geforce2 MX and Geforce4 MX series, they were... crap but cheap, I think the GF4 MX460 was just about passable for people on a severe budget back then but had no idea they were trying to flog stuff based on Geforce 256 this late. I am confused though, you said it doesn't run Quake 3 Arena well and yet... as a Geforce/2 it should run it extremely well, it ran great on Geforce 256, Geforce 2 GTS etc when those were out.

[@GGigabiteM]

The MX4000 had a 64 bit memory bus. I have a Geforce 4 MX4000 with 128 MB of RAM and a 64 bit memory bus. It looks like you got a scam card of a scam card with only half of the memory populated. I can see on the PCB under the heatsink on your card where there are pads for a second memory chip, but it is not installed. My card has two memory chips, I bet if you installed the second memory chip, it'd greatly increase the card's performance. This is the second re-released GPU I've seen in recent years with a halved memory bus to make cheap crippled garbage. Several years ago, I'm guessing some Chinese company found new old stock of ATI Rage XL chips and started cranking out cheap garbage cards with a 32 bit memory bus and only one memory chip. Unfortunately for those cards, they didn't expose the other 32 bits of the memory bus by adding support for a second memory chip and those cards are severely crippled.

[@HappyBeezerStudios]

The "full" 64 bit cards should perform decently mediocre for a cheap card.

[@GGigabiteM]

@@HappyBeezerStudios With the full 64 bit memory bus, they do perform well above integrated garbage from the time, even though they don't support DX8/9. I used to play early 2000s games on one of these and it worked fine for what it was. These cards filled a niche that existed at the time, OEMs releasing systems without AGP or PCIe slots, where these were one of the only cheap options for PCI graphics. There were some later PCI cards with more performance, but they were considerably more expensive.

[@retropcscotland4645]

God the amount of times in the past I bought a video card for name brand without knowing how good or bad it was. AGP was a helluva era.

[@Bboyman1150]

This is just one of the many reasons I will never buy a new graphics card from Nvidia. People keep forgetting or don’t care how many times the straight up scammed or still scam people.

[@AndrewSchott]

I stopped because AMD is better on Linux, which is all I use. But, yeah, nVIDIA is a pretty scummy company to buy from. At least they treat their employees rather well.

[@aprilkolwey4779]

I ordered one of these... I kind of want to see how it compares to the XGI Volari V3 XT. I thought that thing was terrible, but if this video is anything to go by, this might even be worse...

[@dabombinablemi6188]

At least the front of the box has a sticker with 32bit on it, so that if you knew the difference, you'd be able to avoid it. S3 were scamming people back in the day as well (or at least some board partners were). Bought a 32MB Savage4 Pro-M based card, turns out it is a 32bit card. And I was only initially able to tell by a 1:1 comparison with the 16MB Savage4 GT I'd bought months before (made by the same board partner), and later by actually looking at the memory chip markings (and data sheet). The 32bit card was drastically slower, though it at least has AGP 4X so it might be better on my Intel 815E board. 4x 16bit 4MB chips vs 2x 16bit 16MB chips. The 64bit card was manufactured (or at least stickered in store) in 2001.

[@icqme8586]

I bought MX4000 for Intel 810 system. Supported 2 screens and PCI interface.

[@AndrewSchott]

These things were good for that, at a fraction the price of a many year old Matrox. Damn I miss Matrox..... I used alot of these for RHEL thin clients that pulled the OS off a tftp netboot, just enough to fire up qemu+spice. Most were single headed, but some were dual, a couple triple. Almost all were mx4000 boards, a few mx5200 (cheaper card at the time, same driver & config). These cards had their place, just nowhere near the advertised place. Different time zone altogether.

[@georgerockwell-z3c]

my father purchased young me a prebuilt dell pc back in 2005. it did not have an agp slot. i discovered that the onboard gpu could not game. i needed a pci card, and the mx4000 PCI was the only option in my local shop. honestly, it did what i needed, which was to provide hardware T&L. it played UT and Tribes Vengeance for me, i was a very happy little boy.

[@Txm_Dxr_Bxss]

The only use I see for it is if you manage to find a 128Bit version with a PCI connector. Then it's ok for a Windows 98 system that lacks an AGP card.

[@fridaycaliforniaa236]

I bet the cardboard box has more value than the ScamVidia GPU itself ! 😂😂

[@KiLDELTA]

When I was a kid, I asked my parents to buy me a dedicated gpu for our old Pentium as that time it was still running on a motherboard integrated graphics. What they got for me was the Inno3d Ge Force Mx 440, I was happy at first as I had no idea about any pc parts, just what I have seen on tv regarding gaming etc. When i started to buy games and play with it, there was a slight improvement but still not much... that was my very first GPu.

[@AlexDaDermahurr]

13:42 was pretty comical with all the video glitches (probably caused by the aura of the mx4000)

[@saljuice1811]

I had the 3D Fuzion version of this card, but it had 128MB of VRAM! It's what I upgraded my 32MB Geforce 2 MX with. It was technically an improvement, but barely. Didn't help that basically every new game at the time had "(excluding Geforce 4 MX series)" in the system requirements but I didn't notice that til later. I think the 128MB version at least had a 64bit bus.

[@Thomsonicus]

It wasn't considered a "scam" chip in Poland. Just the very, very low end, bought mainly for first time PC users. I recollect it having mainly 64bit wide bus. I've seen 32bit mem bus only once, on a mobile7300Go in a Taiwan laptop. Interesting video. Thanks for putting it together. Love those 3-D rendintions of cards.

[@semyonzhigunov671]

13:43 unexpected YTP

[@exaltedb]

7:07 the 8400 GS might as well be a RTX 4080 when compared to this “card”

[@vadnegru]

I had 8500gt on pre build that family bought. With 512mb vram. It ran all games, at least on 800*600 low. Along with Intel E2160 that could overclock by 40% on that motherboard. Paired with 440gt it shines.

[@DevilbyMoonlight]

I worked for a well known company back in the early 2000's that built machines, I used to build about 20 ish machines a day to make sure I got my bonus.. which had to be strictly built to ISO standards, and used to put these cards into fairly budget builds just like the MX400's of a couple of years earlier..

[@dangingerich2559]

I remember this card from my days in corporate desktop support. I probably deployed 1000 desktops with this card in 2004 and 2005 in corporate settings. It was cheap for corporate uses. Yes, it was horrible at gaming, but it was also the cheapest AGP graphics card available with decent driver support. Yes, there were integrated graphics (Intel chipset graphics) and ATI graphics available, but both of those had horrible drivers, and corporate desktop support people knew the MX 4000 was the only option with drivers that wouldn't massively increase their ticket count.

[@HappyBeezerStudios]

It basically went into the same niche as the FX 5200. Super cheap and this everywhere in the OEM market.

[@dangingerich2559]

@ApeStimplair-et9yk That and OS GUI element acceleration. That's all that was needed.

[@SimekArt]

in a few places I had strange sound effects in the video. Thank You for upload.

[@s0men00bb]

I got Morrowind and Splinter Cell in a box with my GF4 Ti 4800 SE , but that was a decent gaming card in its time. Never figured out how to play Morrowind or was too lazy or something. 😅

[@Kraaketaer]

Hey, no, you got this all wrong: they bundled 3DMark 05 specifically to showcase the card's capabilities - and it does! The inability to run 3DMark 05 is an excellent illustration of the card's capabilities, which are after all pretty much nonexistent.

[@RJRC_105]

You should compare these sorts of cards to Intel GMA integrated graphics. I bet you any money the thing podged onto the motherboard will do better.

[@UKVampy]

Worse card I ever owned was the GeForce 5500, to say lack lustre would be an understatement.

[@HappyBeezerStudios]

Yup, a complete dissapointment. There were basically four FX cards that were okay. The 5200 Ultra (which outperformed the 5500 and 5600), the 5700 (from after they upgraded the chip), the 5800 (the famous fan) and the 5900/5950. And even with those, as with all cards, staying away from all SE, VE, LE cards.

[@Jackpkmn]

Tbh if it had been PCI instead of AGP it could have at least been said it was just a display adapter. This market segment is what made the 8400 so big with its 2 digital and 1 analog native outputs letting you connect 3 displays per adapter installed in a computer.

[@Best_of_the_West_side]

dam were being blessed with vids lately

[@janwitkowsky8787]

Perfect opportunity for antoher Franstein's Win98 build. Via C3 - like Pentium 2/3, (socket 370) but not quite. MX4000 - like Geforce256, but not quite. Elsa soundcard - like Creative Soundblaster, but not quite. CF to IDE stoarge - like an SSD, but not quite. Antec case - like LianLi, but not quite.

[@kiki83607]

CPU AMD K6-2 almost Pentium 2

[@priceyblackwinter2338]

13:43 When the graphics are so bad it makes your own voice have frametime issues

[@yt-is-mal]

A few weeks ago I was building a retro pc for myself and almost got a MX4000, instead I bought a FX5200 which I know is not a great card but it seems to be much better the MX4000.

[@dormcat]

Got an ELSA GLADIAC 518BP 128MB from a friend clearing out his old computer parts. With the same NV18 chip I'd say its performance was on par with MX 440; it does have a merit of having both VGA and DVI ports. Unfortunately I've got more AGP cards than motherboards so this 518BP is still idling in my cabinet. Speaking of longevity: with more and more iGPU capable of playing 3D accelerated games, GF210 can still be purchased new for US$39. 😅

[@vasileios6301]

A very nice budget companion for later s478 celerons, runned San Andreas, NFS Hot Pursuit 2, Willrock and others like a champ.

[@GrainGrown]

*ran

[@vasileios6301]

@@GrainGrown Correct :)

[@johnhunt1725]

That's a pretty good Max Headroom impression🤣

[@MrCaerbannog]

You know the real crazy thing? This wasn't actually the last graphics card derived from the GeForce 4 MX family. The very, very last GF4MX derivative was the GeForce PCX4300, which was basically this card except with an AGP-to-PCIe converter chip slapped on. Though it did at least bump the memory bus back up to 64 bits, for whatever that's worth.

[@annieworroll4373]

Using up excess chips, better option would be to sell them to a motherboard vendor to put on their boards. It wouldn't be any better, but a cut down crap video chip is much more acceptable in that context. They'd be perfectly fine for web browsing and office apps, or for backup in case your actual graphics card crapped out. As a card... maybe just adding monitors that can display some basic 3d stuff like data visualizations? The RX6400(which is more capable of running contemporary software than this apparently) sees some use for that when people need more video outputs but not hardcore gaming(I've got one for VM passthrough, mainly for software development in Windows). Granted they'd have to be priced dirt cheap for either of these uses to make sense, but I'd hesitate to call the thing fundamentally useless. Presenting it as a proper GPU meant for gamers, though, is asinine.

[@Lemurion287]

I can't remember if I had an MX400 or MX4000 (it was over 20 years ago) but I do remember being thrilled when I upgraded to a Radeon 9500 Pro...

[@aussiepunkrocksV20]

Found one of these in a trash picked PC. I keep it for historical purposes only. Generally GeForce2 MX matches or outperforms it, and the earlier GF2 has less driver overhead (early driver revisions).

[@user-k5y8l]

I laughed so hard when there was audio glitches during the UT2004 segment like the card has infected the editing software 😂

[@RJ-vb7gh]

Back in the day, when I built and fixed PC's most of my customers didn't game. They pretty much only needed VGA or Super VGA and Nvidia had a decent reputation as a durable and reliable card. If it could do quickbooks and Word, it was good to go. It might have been a card I picked up cheap, for a repair job on an office computer, when that's what my local parts shop had on sale. My clients were mostly businesses and none ever asked if their video card could game..

[@AndreFreitas91250]

My first GPU. Went for it since mine had 128 MB. I was very disappointed with it but don't remember to be this bad 😅. Upgraded 3 years later with a 7600 gt. Not sure what happened with GTA Vice city (mine did run it reasonably well)

[@notthedroidsyourelookingfo4026]

I checked your videos, don't find one on one of the old Athlons or Semprons. Would be cool, though, to know how they're holding up, or how good they were back then!

[@Tydusis1]

I actually have this card! I got the 128mb version for about $50 at a best buy in late 2005/early 2006. Couldn't convince my mom to spend more at the time, so it was the best i could get. I did feel slightly bummed having it when i later found out i could have had pixel shader 2.0 for a bit more, but it was enough to play UT99/2004, Dawn of War, Halo CE, and was better than than terrible intel igpu that couldn't even render team colors on Halo. As bad as it was, it was enough to do level editing and modding for UT99, which sparked a deep creative love in me. I even used rivatuner to try and squeeze as much as i could out of it

[@carlr2837]

Lol, I found an old graphics card yesterday, and it's a GeForce 2 MX. To put the massive power of these cards in perspective, most modern cards score about 20,000 in G3DMarks from Passmark. These score 2. Even IGPUs score 1-2000.