…But turned out pretty mediocre, though I don’t understand why. And the matter is that SUMA announced their new Platinum GeForce4 MX 420 DDR (64MB), which uses DDR SDRAM as it follows from the name, actually. Moreover, this memory works at 400MHz, as the specs claim (the standard GeForce4 MX420 based cards come with SDRAM working at 166MHz).

At first I thought that another “proper” graphics card had arrived, which doesn’t suffer too much from NVIDIA’s recommendations. However, my suppositions turned out wrong, as the memory access appeared to be only 64bit wide, which automatically makes it none other but an “original mediocrity” (I say “original”, because the memory frequency is 400MHz DDR and not 333MHz DDR. And in fact the solution is very simple. Why not install 4 chips 32bit wide instead of 16bit ones? This will make a 128bit bus, which will not limit the performance of the relatively fast 250MHz chip. But no way! It seems better to make the memory bus twice as narrow and not to mention it anywhere in the specs! So, be careful and don’t get caught by the attractive DDR abbreviation in the name. I doubt that this graphics card will be any faster than the original GeForce4 MX420/SDRAM (see our article called NVIDIA GeForce4 MX420: Weak Link in GeForce4 MX Team?).