Video Cards

XFX GeForce 4 Ti4200 Turbo 8X Review

Brandon0

What we have done here is taken a GeForce4 TI 4200 GPU and slapped it onto an 8 layer PCB. We then populated the PCB with only the highest quality components, and cranked the memory up to a whopping 620MHz. Sound good so far? Well we didn’t stop there; we also threw in a game pad, 3 full version games and six demos. For those individuals looking for a mainstream gaming card, with everything you need in one package, look no further…

Specifications

  • 8X AGP
    Provides double the bandwidth of AGP 4X—2.1GB/sec. vs. 1.1BG/sec. AGP 8X enables more complex models and detailed textures, creating richer and more lifelike environments. Uninterrupted data flow allows for smoother video streaming and faster, more seamless gameplay.
  • nfiniteFX II Engine
    The NVIDIA nfiniteFX II Engine incorporates dual programmable Vertex Shaders, faster Pixel Shaders and 3D textures. The nfiniteFX II Engine gives developers the freedom to program a virtually infinite number of custom special effects to create true-to-life characters and environments.
  • Accuview Antialiasing
    The Accuview Antialiasing subsystem with advanced multisampling hardware delivers full-scene antialiased quality at performance levels never before seen.
  • Lightspeed Memory Architecture II
    LMA II boosts effective memory bandwidth by up to 300%. Radical new technologies including Z-occlusion culling, fast Z-clear, and auto pre-charge effectively multiply the memory bandwidth to ensure fluid frame rates for the latest 3D and 2D games and applications.
  • 3D Textures
    An integral part of the nfiniteFX II and nfiniteFX Engines, 3D textures make hollow objects solid with true three-dimensional material properties such as wood grain or marbling.
  • Shadow Buffers
    Part of the nfiniteFX II and nfiniteFX Engines, shadow buffers enable self-shadowing for characters and objects, and soften the edges of shadows for realistic effects, adding depth to scenes and highlighting spatial relationships between objects.
  • High-Definition Video Processor (HDVP)
    Turns your PC into a fully functional DVD player, and an HDTV player with the purchase of an additional third-party decoder.
  • Unified Driver Architecture (UDA)
    Guarantees forward and backward compatibility with software drivers. Simplifies upgrading to a new NVIDIA product because all NVIDIA products work with the same driver software.
  • Advanced Pixel Shaders
    Part of the nfiniteFX II Engine, advanced Pixel Shaders alter lighting and surface effects that replace artificial, computerized looks with materials and surfaces that mimic reality. Technical advancements deliver substantial performance improvement in all areas, especially three and four texture performance.
  • Dual Vertex Shaders
    Part of the nfiniteFX II Engine, dual Vertex Shaders are used to breathe life and personality into complex characters and environments. By driving more than 100 million processed vertices per second, dual Vertex Shaders make massively populated scenes rich in detail possible.
  • Highest Quality and Highest Performance Microsoft Windows XP Support
    Fully accelerates Windows XP multimedia and user interfaces, making it the ideal Windows XP graphics solution.
  • Lossless Z-Compression
    LMA II contains a lossless form of Z-compression that delivers a 4:1 benefit. Compression is a crucial technique in saving memory bandwidth for higher performance. Microsoft DirectX 8.X and OpenGL 1.3 Optimizations and Support Delivers the best performance and guarantees compatibility with all current and future 3D applications and games.
  • Quad Cache
    LMA II contains a caching system for primitives, vertices, textures and pixels. These caches are individually dedicated and optimized for almost instant graphics pipeline access and reuse.
  • TV-Out and Video Modules
    Gives end users the option of big-screen gaming, digital timeshifting VCR, and video-editing applications.
  • World’s Fastest DDR Memory Interface
    The 10.6GB per second memory subsystem ensures peak performance and the smoothest frame rates ever, allowing extremely high resolutions and full-scene antialiasing as the standard operating mode for most games.
  • Z-Correct Bump Mapping
    The nfiniteFX II engine is capable of making intersecting bump-mapped polygons look realistic and accurate. This is especially important in scenes where water and land interact with each other.I/O Interface:
  • TV-Out connector
  • D-Sub 15-pin VGA connector
  • DVI-I connector for LCD monitorsOperating Systems:
  • WindowsXP/2000/NT/ME/98 & Linux

I previously reviewed a XFX Geforce 4 MX440 which has the same style box as this Geforce 4 Ti4200. This box has a picture of a red bull dog it looks like while the old card had what looks like a wolf thing. The back of this box also has two plastic windows, one to see part of the video card and another to see the gamepad that is included with the card. I really feel that the box of a product is very important because it shows that the company has taken the time and effort to make a high quality product from every perspective.

This is the first time I have seen a gamepad included with a video card but I really like it. This video card is geared towards gamers so why not include a USB gamepad to play those games? The gampad has four main buttons, two paddle buttons on each side, two analog joysticks, and the digital gamepad.

There is also a turbo, clear, and two extra buttons on the front of the controller. The best thing about this controller is that it is USB which is great because it’s hot swappable. Also included are all the accessories needed for the DVI, and S-Video connections.

XFX has included a DVI to VGA adapter so that if you want to use two CRTs you can. They have also included a pass through S-Video cable and a S-Video to RCA cable which can be used with almost every TV. The pass through S-Video cable will give you a better output to your TV but the S-Video to RCA will look good as well.

The video card comes bundled with a good amount of software. Three full version games are included which are Ghost Recon, Comanche 4 and Racing Simulation 3, these aren’t the newest games but they arn’t old by any means.

There are also five demo games on one CD which are Ballistics, Delta Force-Black Hawk Down, IL-2 Sturmovik, Serious Sam: The Second Encounter, and Vietcong. Also included are full versions of CyberLink’s PowerDVD XP and Power Director v2.1 Pro VE which can be used for video editing with the VIVO feature.

The documentation for the video card is quite good explaining all you would need to know. There is a quick install guide for both the controller and video card which are always nice to speed the installation process along. There is also a registration card so you can take advantage of the warrantee on your card.

This video card has a blue PCB and looks to follow the Nvidia reference design for the most part. The card is pretty long and because of that fact there might be some interference with components on a motherboard. Both the front and the back of the video card are covered by a really big heatsink which has a fan right above the core of the card.

I really like that there is a good amount of cooling on this card because it should be a huge benefit for when it comes time to overclock this thing. From the side of the card you can see the VGA, DVI, and S-Video.

As you can see from the core of this card it is indeed a Geforce 4 Ti4200 8x. Geforce 4 Ti4200 video cards almost always use the older style of RAM rather than the newer BGA kind which are better.

The reason that most Ti4200 cards don’t use the BGA is because the Ti4200 is designed to be a powerful yet low price card and the BGA chips are more expensive. This isnt really a big deal in itself but with the BGA chips I should be able to get a little better overclock. I really like the fact that BGA chips were used, this just goes to show that XFX is willing to use the best components for their cards.

This particular video card is using Samsung 3.3ns chips which are faster than that of the Abit Siluro Geforce 4 Ti4200-8X OTES which used 3.6ns non-BGA chips.

I went ahead and took off the heatsinks from the card because I wanted to see what kind of thermal material was used and if it was sufficient. When I took off the heatsinks I was pretty impressed because all of the RAM chips were covered with a good amount of thermal compound.

The core could have used a little more compound than it had because the upper right hand side didn’t have any but I applied some more to cover it completely. You can also see that the heatsinks themselves have a good amount of compound on them which is the shows one more time that XFX is putting out a very high quality product.

Like I said before I thought there might be a problem with installation of this card because of how long it was and I was right. The card has a little tab on the end of it which got in the way of a capacitor on my motherboard.Luckily this tab serves no real purpose so I went ahead and just snapped it off since it was scored to be easily removed. After removing the little tab the card went in without a problem and didn’t touch anything on the motherboard.

I will be using 3DMark2001SE, 3DMark03, Vulpine GLmark, Quake 3, and Unreal Tournament 2003 as benchmarks. All of the testing was done with all the eye candy turned on and everything at it’s highest.

I benchmarked with the resolutions of 1024×768, 1280×1024, and 1600×1200, I did not do 800×600 because I don’t feel that many people out there are using that low of a resolution. I used nVidia’s 41.09 detonator drivers along with DirectX 9.0a. I will be comparing this video card to a Abit Siluro Geforce 4 Ti4200-8X OTES which I reviewed a while back to see which card comes out on top.

Test Bed:

3DMark2001SE is one of the best synthetic benchmarking programs out there and probably used the most for comparison of cards. With all the resolutions the XFX card was just a little bit behind the Abit card. The main reason the Abit scored a little higher is because it comes clocked faster out of the box. At 1024×768 the card was able to break 10,000 marks which is about right for a Ti4200.

3DMark2003 just came out and its much more strenuous on a system than the old 3DMark2001SE. Personally I think right now that 3DMark03 system requirements are way too high but in time as new hardware comes out scores will improve.

In comparison to other cards out on the market right now the Ti4200 is too weak to produce a decent score on 3DMark03 however that isn’t to say that the card is slow, the program just needs too much in my opinion. The Abit again did better than the XFX card because it is faster.

Vulpine GLmark is another synthetic benchmark that is used for video cards, it is not as widely used but I still like it. At 1024×768 the XFX did better than the Abit and with the resolutions above that the was only about 1FPS faster than the XFX card. Even with the Abit card being clocked faster right out of the box the XFX card was able to stay right with it.

Quake 3 is probably the most used game benchmark around the world and it will be used here as well. All of the graphical and sound settings were set to the highest settings to stress the card as much as possible. At 1024×768 the Abit card was faster than the XFX card by 11.1FPS but at 1280×1024 and 1600×1200 the XFX card was faster 1.6FPS and 10.5FPS.

Final testing was done with Unreal Tournament 2003 which is one of the newer and more stressful games. I used the standard benchmarking tool which was included with the game to do this testing so you would be able to more easily compare with the results. The benchmark does a flyby of the map and a bot match benchmark for each resolution.

I only made a graph for the flyby because I felt the bot match benchmark was irrelevant because it is done in 3rd person rather than 1st person like the game is played. With all the tests the Abit card was able to output higher FPS than the XFX card but again this is due to the fact that stock speed of both the core and memory speed on the Abit are faster.

Overclocking of this video card was done with the Coolbits registry hack which works with the detonator drivers. The core comes stock at 250/620 which means it is already overclocked from the Ti4200 speeds. Because this video card has superior cooling in comparison to other cards which have a little fan and heatsink it should overclock quite well.

I slowly overclocked the card little by little so that it would be able to burn in and adjust. After a few days of slowly increasing the speed of the card I reached the highest stable speed which was 295/675. I am very impressed with how well this card overclocked, the fact that such good RAM is used is a big factor in that. Not only was the RAM able to overclock a lot straight out of the box but the core was also able to overclock a lot.

Conclusion

This is the second Geforce 4 Ti4200 that I have reviewed and I am very impressed with it. The thing I am most impressed about with this card is that it is such a good overclocker. Not only does the cards memory come overclocked but it is able to overclock even more from that!

The heatsinks on this video card help the overclocking a lot along with the fact that a good amount of thermal compound is used on all of the necessary components. The card comes with all the cables and adapters needed to take advantage of the VGA, DVI, and S-Video which is really nice.

Not only is this a good video card in itself but it also comes with a USB gamepad and a really good software bundle which is awesome. There are really no cons to this video card except for the fact that the GeforceFX is coming out soon which isn’t a flaw with the card itself. Because I am so pleased with this card I am going to give it a 10/10 and award it the OCmodshop Seal of Approval. I would like to thank XFX for sending me this card.

Pros

  • Blue PCB
  • Cables and converters included
  • Good heatsinkfan combo
  • Good amount of thermal compound used
  • VGA, DVI, and S-Video
  • Gamepad included
  • Good software bundle
  • 3.3ns BGA RAM chips used
  • Great overclocker

Cons

  • GeforceFX is right around the corner

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