ABIT Siluro GeForce 4 MX440

Performance

Let's get down to business.  Our collection of benchmarks consist of Mad Onion's 3D Mark 2001 SE; 3D Mark 2000 v1.1; Unreal Tournament using the Thunder demo; and of course Quake3 Arena.  The Quake benchmarks were obtained utilizing the Guru of 3D's Q3Bench program.  All scores are the average of three runs of each benchmark.

Test Bed

• AOpen AX45 P4 Motherboard (SiS645)

• Intel Pentium 4 1.8GHz Northwood

• 256 MB OCZ PC2400 DDR RAM 

• 20GB Western Digital ATA100 7,200 RPM HDD

• Senfu open work station housing

The comparison video cards are an ASUS V8200 GeForce3 and an ABIT Siluro GeForce2 MX400.  Each of the following graphs will show results of all three cards.  Both the ABIT Siluro GF2 MX400 and the ASUS GeForce 3 were courtesy of Arena Computers.

First up, 3D Mark 2001 SE and 3D Mark 2000 v1.1.

See how 3D Mark 2000 shows the scores between the GF4 MX and the GF3 as a much narrower gap than with the 3D Mark 2001 SE?  This is primarily due to 2001 SE's ability to test a card's Direct X 8.1 ability.

Unreal Tournament is an excellent benchmark to show Direct 3D capabilities.  We used the Reverend's Thunder demo with default settings employed.  1024 x 768 resolution, 32 bit color, world and skin detail set at high.

Now the UT bench above really surprised me with the GF2 MX400 being so close to the GF4 MX.  UT is an older Direct 3D game that doesn't take advantage of the latest Direct X.