I know very little about cards and have 2 options available to me. PNY GeForce 4 440 8x 64mb,PNY GeForce FX 5200 ultra 128mb. The specs look very similar,but I know one must be better than the other so any thoughts or ideas would be much appreciated:)
           
                          Navin R Johnson aka Gaspumper

Here are some rough figures based on benchmarks done on machines with 2 ghz CPU's Using 3D Mark 2001.

The GF4 MX440 will get you about 4500 points

The FX5200 should weigh in around 7000 points.

A pretty big difference.

I recently "upgraded" from the 440 to the 5200 myself.
Has it's been said, my frames where about the same, with a slight increase on the 5200, but i now have none of my previous texture related issues, and fewer slowdowns, or at least less noticable ones, in heavily populated 3d enviroments.
I'd say overall graphics quality improved also.
I'd go with the FX5200 card if I were you.

Geforce MX cards are for business computers. get the FX and I hate ATI 

*sittinginfrontofhispcwithaveryangryexpressiononhisface*

a) ATI ain't expensive (look at the prices of nVidias 5900 series)

b)the drivers aren't unstable,they run very well.

http://www6.tomshardware.com/graphic/20030714/vga_card_guide-12.html

Proof that the Geforce FX5800 and FX5900 are better than ATI in terms of benchmarks. Even the aging Ti 4200 out ranks most of ATI's 9000 series. In FS2004, I was getting 60fps over the Caribbean when I turned off the frame lock.

When I think about it, I had two bad experiances with ATI. When before I bought my K7S5A board, I was running Windows 98Se with a ATI Radeon PCI 32mb card on a old P2 233mhz system. It worked fine. When I upgraded to the new system, the card no longer worked at all. Later on before I bought my Geforce FX5200, I bought a Radeon 8500LE. I installed it under Windows XP with the latest drivers. I was getting very corrupted graphics with sub-Geforce2 frame rates. I've had no problems with my Nvidias. The current card I have is a Jaton 3DForce FX5200 128mb DDR 8X AGP.  

lol, I got more than i paid for it 

I bought a PNY FX5200. POS aleart. It just died. Do not buy a PNY FX 5200. Get a TI 4200 from newegg and overclock it. The FX 5200 comes with slow RAM, even slower GPU core, and has trouble with just about anything.

If you are going ot get a FX 5200, get the Proliant card. It has faster RAM, and a better GPU core clock.

You can find TI 4200's for $90 and overclock them. You'd basically be getting a TI 4600.

Quote:


Append to the FX 5200: RAM: 4NS 400mhz DDR

Append to the MX440: RAM: 3.3NS 500mhz DDR

Those fill rates are burst fill rates. I definatly didn't get 10 gb/s on my FX 5200. =\ Out of those two, I'd take the MX 440. (I happen to be using one. :p)

Quote:


Download and run 3DMark 2000. Then, do the same with 3DMark 2001SE and 3DMark 2003. Now, rename each .exe application to something of your choice (like blather.exe). Rerun each of the benchmarks. You will notice a considerable drop in score.

ATi and NVidia cards are so different, you cannot readily compare them on equal grounds. ATi cards have excellent AA, whereas NVidia cards have excellent AF. I have an LCD, do I get both without having my video card render it. :p Just... Stay away from Matrox. XD