Mick Lockey

MSI G4MX460-VTP

If you're looking for a great value in a general-purpose graphics card that can handle a variety of tasks and casual gaming, the MSI G4MX460-VTP is hard to beat. Of the boards we've tested, it's one of the few in this price range that offers dual-display support and both S-Video-out and composite-out ports.It's also one of the fastest sub-$150 boards we've seen--second only to the ATI Radeon 9000 Pro we benchmarked at the same time. At 1024 by 760, the G4MX460-VTP delivered frame rates above 60 frames per second in all of our test games, with the exception of Comanche 4. (None of the boards we tested hit frame rates above 60 fps in this game.) Frame rates dropped off at or above 1280 by 1024 resolution. MSI's board had its best showing in our 3D modeling tests using 3D Studio Max, in which it out-performed higher-end cards based on GeForce4 Ti chips.
We found little to quibble about.
Running Unreal Tournament 2003 with antialiasing turned on--using MSI's Quincunx (five samples per pixel) mode--we noticed modest improvement in image quality--edges looked less jagged, and we saw less shimmering in textures than we saw when antialiasing was turned off. The G4MX460-VTP comes with a well-rounded software bundle that includes a video editing app, color-calibration software, and a software DVD player, plus some games ubiquitous to MSI's graphics boards: Aquanox, The Operative: No One Lives Forever, and Sacrifice. To test image quality, a three-person panel watched demos of our test applications and observed each card's ability to render complex textures and to display colors and contrast. We saw little difference in image quality between this lower-priced board and the high-end models.
Dual-display support, an attractive price, and above-average performance make this a competent card for general computing and lower-resolution gaming.

Buying Information

MSI G4MX460-VTP $ http://