The Verto GeForce3™ Ti 200 is a member of the new Titanium (Ti) series from PNY. It utilizes the proven NVIDIA nfiniteFX™ engine and enhanced 3D Textures and Shadow Buffer features for awesome visual effects in intense gaming and multimedia computing applications. The card’s 256-bit graphics engine with Lightspeed Memory Architecture™ and HRAA (High-Resolution Antialiasing) produces scorching frame rates and fluid motion for heightened realism in intense gaming applications. The Verto GeForce3 Ti 200’s 350MHz RAMDAC, 128-bit wide optimized DDR SDRAM memory interface and memory bandwidth of 8.0 GB/sec. generates unsurpassed 2D/3D graphics performance. The card’s Vertex and Pixel Shaders heighten the visual drama by creating life-like environments, with custom lighting, textures and intense animation. The card delivers the fastest Direct3D® and OpenGL® acceleration in its class. The onboard TV-out and DVI functionality enables the option of big-screen gaming on a TV or digital monitor.
Verto GeForce3 Ti 200 AGP Graphics Cards At-A-Glance
- 64MB of double data rate (DDR) SDRAM memory.
- 6.4 GB/sec. memory bandwidth.
- Delivers the industry’s best visual quality in high intensity graphic applications.
- Sleek, black and titanium-colored card.
- nfiniteFX Engine – Enables dynamic, breakthrough effects, which deliver the next leap into realistic 3D graphics. Provides superior visual effects including enhanced 3D Textures, Shadow Buffers, Vertex and Pixel Shaders for superior game play.
- Lightspeed Memory Architecture provides earth-shattering performance and fluid motion for complex scenes and visuals – delivering more than 800 billion operations (BOPS) – more than twice the performance available with standard GPUs.
- Shadow Buffers – Sophisticated image rendering technology enables characters and objects to cast realistic shadows, including self-shadowing, and the resulting shadow to have soft edges, maximizing realism.
- Superior 3D Textures – Enables textures to cut through objects for realistic wood grain or marbling.
Key Features & Benefits
- Detonator™ XP – Unified Driver Architecture guarantees forward and backward software driver compatibility across all implementations, simplifying upgrades to future NVIDIA hardware.
- High-Definition Video Processor (HDVP) turns the PC into a full-quality DVD player.
- TV-Out and Video Modules – Enables big-screen gaming.
- High-Resolution Antialiasing (HRAA) with Quincunx AA – Delivers a high level of detail and crisp, clean lines at high frame rates.
- AGP 4X/2X and AGP texturing support takes advantage of new methods of transferring 32-bit color textures and high-polygon-count scenes.
- Microsoft® DirectX® 8.1 Compatibility – Delivers the best performance and guarantees compatibility with all current and future applications and games.
Everything that comes with this card looks absolutly great the graphics on the box are very cool and even more important this card is one of the best looking ones on the market in my opinion.
As you can see the box is designed to catch your eye but the picture of the card itself simply does not do it justice.
The top of the card with the killer looking heatsinnk and ramsinks
The back of the card, I really like the black PCB
The VGA, S-Video, and DVI connectors
I took the heatsink off along with one of the ramsinks to see what kind of thermal protection it was using as well as how many nanosecconds the RAM access time was, as you can see it uses 4ns Hynix chips.
When I took off the heatsink I was a little disapointed to see an ugly pink thermal pad rather than some thermal compound. Also the RAMsinks are using frag tape rather than thermal epoxy.
The PNY Geforce 3 Ti 200 comes with a manual, driver CD, Giants: Citizen Kabuto (not pictured)and a few PNY advertisements. I would have liked to see more games and better titles included, however that would have raised the price of the card i’m sure.
Test Setup:
- EPoX 8KHA+
- AMD Athlon XP 1900+
- 512MB PC2100 Crucial DDR
- Sound Blaster Live! Platinum 5.1
- Linksys LNE100TX
- Windows 2000 SP2
- Nvidia 22.50 drivers
- Via 4.37 4-in-1 Driver
For the tests I used Windows 2000 SP2, the newest 4-in-1 drivers, and decided to use the 22.50 drivers from nVIDIA rather than the 15.20 set that came on the install CD. For all of the benchmarks I used 32bit color and had everything at the highest quality settings. FSAA was off and so was Vsync.
Even though 3DMark 2000 is somewhat outdated I decided to benchmark with it anyways.
This card does quite well especially for its stock clock speed. But as you can see when I did the 1600×1200 benchmark the scores dramatically dropped.
At 800×600 and 1024×768 this card does exceptionally well, but at 1280×1024 and 1600×1200 the FPS drop quite low.
Again the same trend continues where as the FPS drop from 152 to 103 from 1024×768 to 1280×1024.
Serious Sam seems to have done better dropping about the same amount each time the resolution was increased loosing about 20 FPS with each step.
The PNY Geforce 3 Ti 200 comes with the powerstip utility to overclock this video card, however I decided to use coolbits which is a simple registry entry that will allow you to change the core and memory speeds with almost any nVIDIA video card.
As you can see from the images above I was able to overclock the core clock frequency from the stock 175Mhz to 200Mhz. I was also able to overclock the memory clock frequency from 400 to 460. I tried to get the memory higher but when I changed it to 480 I started getting artifacts, so I moved it back down to 460. This card is a great overclocker, as you can see I gained 25Mhz on the core, and 60Mhz on the memory. With this overclock I am at the stock speed of a normal Geforce 3. I redid each benchmark with the overclocked speed at 1024×768 for a bit of comparison.
With the overclock 3DMark 2000 increased its score by almost 1000.
3DMark 2001 increased by a little over 500 points.
Vulpine GLmarks FPS at 1024×768 increased by about 8.
Quake III increased by 13 FPS in Demo001.
Serious Sam increased by just over 8 FPS, similar to GLmark.
The PNY Geforce 3 Ti 200 is definitely a great card for many reasons. You can’t really argue with a price of about $160 retail for a card like this. Not only does it have a DVI connector but it also S-Video out. Also with this card being able to easily do speeds of a normal Geforce 3 with stock cooling. At the time being for all conventional uses of a video card, such as today’s games and applications this card will suit anyone wanting a top notch card that will provide excellent results while keeping the cost low.
PNY decided to use good 4ns memory, which made the overclocking so easy. However I would have like to have seen some thermal compound on the GPU and thermal epoxy on the RAMsinks rather than the conventional pink thermal pad and frag tape. This however is an easy fix for you hardcore overclockers who want to push your card to its very limits.
Overall I am very satisfied with this card and would recommend it to anyone who wants to spend around $150 on an upgrade for a video card. If you are still using a Geforce 2MX or TNT2 I would suggest that this might be the card for you. It will offer much more than what you are currently using and you should be very happy with it.
Pros:
- Well priced
- PCB and RAMsinks look awesome
- Overclocks to Geforce 3 speeds
- DVI and S-Video connections
Cons:
- No S-Video cable
- Thermal pad and frag tape used
- Game bundle is lacking