NVIDIA is about to announce a low-cost version of its GeForce4 MX440-8x for cost-effective personal computers. The new product is expected to receive GeForce MX4000 brand-name and to substitute some other inexpensive solutions from NVIDIA and its add-in-card partners.

The solution will be based on the good-old NVIDIA GeForce4 MX design supporting DirectX 7 capabilities as well as Vertex Shader processing. The GPU has two rendering pipelines with two TMUs per each – NVIDIA’s proven and efficient architecture of DirectX 7 class chips. The graphics processor of the new GeForce MX4000 design is rumored to be clocked at 275MHz.

Unlike the GeForce4 MX440SE, the new GeForce MX4000 will support 128-bit memory bus for up to 64 or 128MB of DDR SDRAM at 400MHz, according to DarkCrow web-site. As a result, expect the solution to be relatively good at quite some games like the Quake III Arena without a lot of eye-candy, of course, but with sufficient frame-rate.

The main destination of the MX4000-based graphics cards is not gamer’s market, but the market of office and educational PCs. Offering D-Sub, DVI-I and TV-Out connectors and packing some 3D features, the GeForce MX4000 may become a reasonable choice for office computers, or machines used by educational institutions. Up to this year NVIDIA sold its TNT2- and GeForce2 MX-series into those markets. Now the company is moving here with a little bit better solution.

The GeForce MX4000 solution could be designed for OEMs or some particular AIBs and at this point it is hard to elaborate on its availability.

The information about the GeForce MX4000 is fully unofficial and no NVIDIA representative has commented on it so far. Therefore, I advice the readers to take the details with a grain of salt and also keep in mind that specifications of entry-level graphics cards are always subject to vary from model to model.