NVIDIA GeForce4 440 Go

There is a general consensus in the world today that monopolies are bad. Recent years have seen the US Department of Justice file go after Microsoft for anti-competitive practices and the European Commission block the proposed merger of Sprint and WorldCom, both for good reasons. The creation of monopolies are associated with a number of free market problems, including price inflation and lack of innovation.

It is for these reasons and more that we encourage competition in the computer industry. On top of the pricing issues, a secure market share gives a company the luxury of being lazy, and laziness is something we don't need in the ever-growing world of computers. With the growing role each component on a computer plays, a company with monopoly-style control over a specific component could stifle innovation throughout the whole technology field. Healthy competition drives companies to provide the best product for the consumer, at least that is what Adam Smith has us believe.

Because lack of competition is generally bad, and because we like to see a good battle, we could not have been more excited when NVIDIA decided to expand its attack on ATI by taking on the company's mobile division. Prior to NVIDIA entering the market, 3D based solutions for mobile computing were almost exclusively produced by ATI. The company had large wins with many OEMs and essentially dominated the mobile graphics industry; NVIDIA threatened to change all that.

Competition between the two companies on the mobile side has only increased since NVIDIA entered the mobile market almost two years ago. The industry has seen a new generation of mobile video solutions appear from each company, resulting in what could be one of the largest advancements in the mobile computing world: bringing desktop-like 3D abilities to laptops.

At the end of August last year, ATI announced the availability of their latest mobile graphics part, the Mobility Radeon 7500. NVIDIA punched back at the end of November, announcing their GeForce4 Go series mobile graphics chips. A month ago, we took a look at the Mobility 7500 in our Compaq Presario 2800 review. Today we take a look at the GeForce4 Go with a Dell machine running a GeForce4 440 Go.