Introduction

The GeForce4 MX has been in the market longer than its powerful Ti – counterparts. As such, the GeForce4 MX is surely and steadily eroding away the former value for performance market leader, the GeForce2 MX. When the GeForce2 MX was at its heyday, its market pricing was under the S$250 mark depending on the make and configuration. Now it’s clearing away at bargain basement prices of an average of S$100 or less, going the way of the ancient NVIDIA TNT2-M64, while the new GeForce4 MX is retailing around the S$250 price bracket. For the current timeline, NVIDIA is positioning the GeForce4 MX to be a mainstream product and the GeForce4 Ti for gaming enthusiasts while phasing out most of its older chipsets.

Joining in the fray to expand the GeForce4 segment is Chaintech with a whole slew of products in this segment. Chaintech has primarily been a mainboard manufacturer for the OEM and retail sectors for more than a decade and only in the last few years they have expanded to cover barebone systems, modems and graphics cards. All these were ventured in to primarily reduce costs for themselves and their OEM partners. Hence, Chaintech was formerly only interested in manufacturing low-end video cards, some of which were available in retail too.

With experience behind them, Chaintech prepped itself for a larger slice of the graphics card segment; and what better way to penetrate it than by making a statement with their skillfully crafted Special Edition cards. The Chaintech GeForce4 MX440 Special Edition with 64MB DDR & TV-Output is just one of them.

Packaged in a large golden brown box that has shiny gold and blue trimmings and words, with a clear plastic window showcasing the beauty of the card within, this is one manufacturer that does not want you to miss nor forget their products. Packaging forms an important part of marketing the product and Chaintech has broken out of that shell with more aggressive product designs and fancy boxes. Still, at the end of the day, the reliability and performance of the product that lies within the wrappings would determine if it would succeed in the marketplace or not.

The new packaging concept keeps everything neat inside the box.

In the box, you'll find the card, an S-Video cable and a DVD case, which comes with a simple printed Users’s Guide, Drivers and Utilities CD and two games, albeit the games are a tad old for liking. In all, you’ll be getting the following:

InterVideo WinDVD

3Deep (3D monitor calibration software)

TurboGfx (Graphics card tweaking utility)

AquaNox (Full version)

MDK2 (Full version)

Everything comes in a nice DVD case.

The manual, software/games package and drivers CDs all in a neat package within a DVD-casing. Definitely a fresh concept!