ABIT Siluro GeForce 4 MX440

What you get

Included is the GeForce 4 MX card, manual, driver and utility CD, and pass through cables so you can utilize the TV out with your camcorder, satellite dish, television, or VCR.

Nothing I like better than colored PCB.  ABIT has gone with a blue PCB on the Siluro GF4 MX.  Not that this does a thing for the performance but it sure looks cool.

In looking at the card you will notice that there are no RAM sinks.  The GPU gets a fat little aluminum heatsink/fan but nothing for the memory.  The reason for this is that the four memory modules (16 megs each) are of lesser expensive Samsung DDR RAM.  Remember, this card is geared to be economical.  If ABIT had slapped on some high end RAM the result would be a high dollar card.  This tid-bit of information made me a little down hearted thinking that when it came time to put the jack on this card, the memory almost certainly wouldn't be up to the task.

  

  

ABIT's attention to detail showed through when we removed the GPU's heatsink.  No tape or half assed squirt of thermal goo here.  A nice even layer of paste on the entire surface of the GPU.  You would think this to be the standard but it unfortunately is not; except for ABIT maybe.

Drivers / Software Extras

Included on the driver disk was ABIT's version of the 27.30 Detonators. 

  

What is special about these Detonators is that a Clock Frequency tab is there.  No need to go get cool-bits or install Power Strip.  ABIT gives you the access right from the get go.  The GPU slider allows for frequencies of 240MHz to 340MHz.  The memory slider allows you frequencies of 355MHz to 500MHz.  The stock speed is 270MHz on the core and 400MHz on the memory.  With what we mentioned earlier, I think the 500MHz limit will elude us.

Under the nView tab you find access to spreading out your work, games, whatever across several monitors.  I'm not going to spend any time on this being that this function isn't specifically relevant to the average performance freak.  Here is the link to NVidia's brief on nView for more if you like.

One of the VGA utilities on the Driver Disk is ABIT's Graphics Max.  This is an overclocking program that provides the same scale as the overclocking sliders in the display control panel.

  

I get off when I see this type of warning.