[imacman11]

Is the new NVIDIA GeForce4 440 Go worth it? The one in the AlBook?

[k2director]

You can read about its PC performance at this link:

http://www.anandtech.com/mobile/showdoc.html?i=1642&p=1

[k2director]

It's odd that the 12" Book (867) has a better graphics chip than the 17". Check out this link (http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.html?i=1745&p=1) for tests of the 12"'s Nvidia 420 compared to the ATI 9000--in most tests, the 420 smokes the 9000. And yet the 17" Book has the 440, which seems to run more or less neck and neck with the 9000.

The review in the link above says that the 420 burns a lot of power--I wonder if Apple was trying to reduce battery drain by going with the 440 in the 17" Book.

Nonetheless, it bugs me that the best gaming chip is in the $1799 model!

[365]

Originally posted by k2director:
You can read about its PC performance at this link:

http://www.anandtech.com/mobile/showdoc.html?i=1642&p=1

Look at the date of that article, June 2002. Is this still the defacto standard?

[thunderous_funker]

Sorry to inform that this confusion is due to some regrettable naming scheme from nvidia.

The top of the line mobile chip is the GeForce4 4200 Go which is based on the 8x AGP desktop Geforce4 Ti chips.

The chip in the new PB's is the GeForce4 420 Go and 440 Go which are based on the GeForce4 MX desktop chips.

Sadly, the ATI 9000 mobile is faster than the 440/420 Go chips. This means the older 15" TiBooks have better GPU than the new 12" & 17" PB's.

I suspect it's a matter of supply chain, price, heat, power consumption or other such factors that led to this slight hitch. Still a fast chip, but not top of the line.

[thunderous_funker]

Sorry to inform that this confusion is due to some regrettable naming scheme from nvidia.

The top of the line mobile chip is the GeForce4 4200 Go which is based on the 8x AGP desktop Geforce4 Ti chips.

The chip in the new PB's is the GeForce4 420 Go and 440 Go which are based on the GeForce4 MX desktop chips.

Sadly, the ATI 9000 mobile is faster than the 440/420 Go chips. This means the older 15" TiBooks have better GPU than the new 12" & 17" PB's.

I suspect it's a matter of supply chain, price, heat, power consumption or other such factors that led to this slight hitch. Still a fast chip, but not top of the line.

[DigitalDNA]

Originally posted by thunderous_funker:
Sorry to inform that this confusion is due to some regrettable naming scheme from nvidia.

The top of the line mobile chip is the GeForce4 4200 Go which is based on the 8x AGP desktop Geforce4 Ti chips.

The chip in the new PB's is the GeForce4 420 Go and 440 Go which are based on the GeForce4 MX desktop chips.

Sadly, the ATI 9000 mobile is faster than the 440/420 Go chips. This means the older 15" TiBooks have better GPU than the new 12" & 17" PB's.

I suspect it's a matter of supply chain, price, heat, power consumption or other such factors that led to this slight hitch. Still a fast chip, but not top of the line.

Do you have any links showing this? All the ones I find pretty much say overall there isn't much difference and the main differences are shown comparing DirectX performance on cards. I haven't seen any comparing the cards on OpenGL tests. Before I'm too disappointed, I would like to see some benchmarks that are relative to Mac hardware.

[k2director]

Yup, you're right. Missed that little extra zero at the end of the 4200. Makes a world of difference!

Fortunately, Barefeats is coming back online, so perhaps they'll publish some benchmarks between all the graphics chips. All I can say is there's no way I'd want a chip that's not at least *a bit* better than the ATI 7500 I have in my 800DVI....

[thebunny]

Wanna link? Here it is (Radeon 9000 smokes the GF4 440 Go):

<http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.htm...01082003015410>

Ta-da

[workerbee]

Originally posted by thebunny:
Wanna link? Here it is (Radeon 9000 smokes the GF4 440 Go):

<http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.htm...01082003015410>

Here's another: http://www17.tomshardware.com/mobile...on9000-03.html.
The GF440 is faster than the ATIs in Quake3 though (see next page). Probably that's why Apple in its unending wisdom chose it over the ATI.

Well, let's wait for the test results anyway... maybe things are different on the Apple side of the fence.

[Riemann Zeta]

Unfortunately, it seems that all of these high-end graphics firms have neither marketing nor advertising agencies working for them. Hence, we are left with product names like the GeForce 5 FX Ultra MX Pro 5 Go 5200, which is of course, dramatically different than the GeForce 5 FX Ultra MX Pro 5 Go 520. But I digress. I just ordered a Powerbook Ti 1 GHz instead of a MonsterBook for exactly this reason--the NVIDIA card performs poorly and eats battery. On a side note, are there any laptops out there with the NVIDIA GeForce 4 Go 4200 8X yet? Imagine the battery life of a laptop with an Intel Pentium "Mobile" chip running at 3.06 GHz, a GeForce 4 Go 4200 8X, a 17 inch screen and a DVD Burner. 21 minute battery anyone?

[Sean Li]

Check out http://www.voodoopc.com/

They make a couple of laptops that break the 10lb weight limit, including the 3.06GHz Pentium, etc... but no nVidia (ATI RADEON 9000 instead).

But still no fibre optic keyboard light