My old Shuttle xPC Windows XP PC has needed a little more grunt for a while. The motherboard has an 8x AGP slot so my choice of cards was slightly limited. After a bit of research I found the best AGP 8x card available and then discovered they fetch £150+ on eBay. So i started reducing my specification until I found some cards for a reasonable price. However, even at that point I came across an issue which I haven’t had for a long time, the Shuttle xPC only has a 230w power supply and this was no where near enough for the higher end AGP cards of the time.
I eventually settled for this little beauty. The GeForce 4 MX440. With a staggering 64mb of RAM and both VGA and DVI ports it’s an amazing piece of hardware for £15. Well maybe not amazing but it runs the orignal GTA at a frame rate that is far too fast to be playable so I have to turn the frame limiter on.
This PC is never really going to be used as a gaming machine, but it’s nice that it can run the old classics of which some don’t work very nicely, or at all in Windows 10 on modern hardware. Time to run up some of those old talkie editions of point and click adventures like Simon the Sorcerer and Day of the Tentacle.
Be the first to comment