Asus GeForce GT440

Full Review

The Asus GeForce GT 440 is aimed at the value minded segment of the consumer market. This card is comparable, on the Nvidia side, to the GT 240 and 9800 GT. Among the competition from AMD, its counterparts would have to be the Radeon 5670 and the Radeon 6670. 

Relatively lower end PC users, who are looking to solely upgrade the graphics capabilities of their systems, would be on the lookout for affordable cards that can meet their needs of playing games at relatively respectable settings. The Asus GeForce GT 440 would be what these folks are looking for.


Specifications
The GT 440 features Nvidia's GF108 GPU core, the same one as seen on the entry level GeForce GT 430 graphics card, but with higher core and memory clock speeds than the GT430.

The Asus GeForce GT440 (ENGT440/DI/1GD5) reviewed here is an overclocked variant. It has 1GB GDDR5 video memory clocked at 800 MHz, a GPU core clocked at 822 Mhz (810 MHz on Nvidia's stock GPU). It features a 128-bit memory interface and 96 shaders (or CUDA cores) that support DirectX 11, OpenGL 4.0, CUDA, PhysX, and Nvidia 3D Vision.


For more first-hand information, a GPU-Z screenshot above shows GPU specs in detail.

The card does not need an extra 6-pin PCI-E power connector. This is a very helpful feature, especially for folks who just want to buy a graphics card and use it with their existing PSU. On Nvidia's side of the fence, the GT440 forms the threshold, past which anything higher may need PSU upgrades on relatively lower-end desktop PCs.


Design
The card has a dual slot cooler, and as the heatsink is not entirely enclosed, some heat may dissipate in the cabinet, raising ambient temperature slightly.


As the photo above shows, the GT440 has no SLI connector.


The display outputs include one port each, of VGA, DVI, and HDMI.


Heat Dissipation
The cooler did a good job of keeping the card cool. It did become slightly audible when tested at full load, but otherwise it was almost inaudible. The Asus GT 440 has similar temperature readings to the GTX 550 Ti, at both idle and operation. The GT440 is rated for a TDP of 65W.


Temperature load tested using FurMark.


Package Contents
The Asus GT440 card comes packaged with the SpeedSetup instruction manual and a standard CD that offered the Nvidia ForceWare drivers, manual, and software such as Asus GamerOSD and SmartDoctor.


Performance
To eliminate bottle-necks to the extent possible, the test-bed consisted of an Intel Core i7 965 processor, Intel DX58SO motherboard, Intel X25-M 80GB SSD, 12GB of Silicon Power DDR3 RAM in triple channel, Tagan BZ-1300W PSU and Windows 7 Ultimate SP1 64-bit edition. We used the latest WHQL driver available for the GT440 at the time of testing. Note that PhysX was enabled wherever supported by the benchmark or game.

The graphs displayed here show the performance numbers selected from a wider set of tests conducted. We compared this card with the MSI GeForce GTX 550 Ti and the Asus GeForce ENGTS450 TOP DirectCU, as they are cards that are positioned just above the GT 440,  of so as to give you an idea of where the Asus GT440 stands, performance wise.---

Displayed below are the performance graphs of how the Asus GeForce GT 440 graphics card fared in synthetic benchmarks:


Benchmarks: 3D Mark 2006 (DirectX 9.0c) and 3D Mark Vantage at 'High' and 'Performance' Presets(DirectX 10).


Benchmark: 3D Mark 11 at all presets (DirectX 11).


Benchmark: Unigine Heaven 2.1 (DirectX 11) at Full-HD resolution.


Below is a graph of gaming performance showing frame-rates, to reflect what you would see in real-world usage patterns:


Benchmark: Crysis, Far Cry 2 (DirectX 10) and Metro 2033 (DirectX 11) at Full-HD resolution.

We ran the game tests at full HD resolution, to see how it would fare under those conditions and for comparison purposes. The results at the high resolutions are but one aspect of the Asus GT 440's performance. So when playing Far Cry 2 at 1024x768 resolution and all other settings maxed out, the Asus GT440 was able to generate an average frame rate of 41.93 fps (frames per second), which is a very good result for playing games at this resolution and appropriate settings. Consequently, if you were to lower these settings, you can hope to further improve on the performance of this card. The GT 440 gives a good account of itself despite being positioned just below the other cards.

Bottom Line

The ASUS GeForce GT440 is a factory overclocked unit that doesn't need an extra power connector. The latter aspect is a very valuable feature for those of you who only plan to get a graphics card without having to go to the extra trouble of upgrading the rest of the system to accommodate the new graphics hardware. Moreover, the performance seen is an indicator that the GT 440 is a very good card in the value segment. So if you are not planning on upgrading your current system for sometime, but just want to add a graphics card, then the Asus GeForce GT 440 is what you should be looking at. And given how it comes for a price of Rs. 5,500, is all the more incentive to get it.

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