64MB GeForce4 Ti4200 Roundup - More Cards

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GAINWARD GSLE GeForce4 Ti4200 64MB DDR

Street Price:	$128.00
http://www.gainward.com/

 

Gainward has the best price of the bunch, and show us one of the reasons by being a little light on the bundled software front.  The card comes with drivers, an overclocking "Experttool" utility, and WinDVD.  No games or demos to be found.  This is not necessarily a bad thing because to be honest I don't recall the last time I actually even took an "included" game out of the sleeve, but it is something nice that is noticeably lacking in the Gainward card.

What this card lacks in software, it makes up for in appearance.  With a stellar orb of sorts on the chipset, and low profile matching aluminum sinks on the memory.  Colored PCB is becoming more and more popular with manufacturers today, Gainward chose Red for this 4200 and I have to say that with the red sinks and orb it definitely looks good.  The fact that they also placed the low profile sinks on the back of the card shows us they had the overclocker in mind, but did it do any good?

 

 

The Gainward 4200 has the highly touted 3.3ns memory, which is by far the fastest memory in the group of cards.  I don't know if perhaps we had bad luck or what the deal was, but we were not able to get impressive memory speeds out of this faster memory.  While this card was no slouch, it certainly did not over impress when it came to memory OC performance.  It actually came in at the lower end of the scale in maximum stable memory overclock at 594mhz.  We tried overclocking it with both RivaTuner and the "Experttool" the card came with simply to no avail.

Just because the memory didn't overclock as high as we expected doesn't mean the card did not impress us.  It was one of the better performers at default speed and the sheer beauty of this card is worth a few points for sure!

Gainward also included a  DVI to D-Sub VGA converter which I can't reiterate enough what a nice touch that is.  The also included the standard S-Video to RCA converter.  Gainward, like most of the manufacturers make it almost foolish not to utilize the nView or TV out with the compliment of accessories.  With DVD's all the rage right now, these features are something you should demand in a card.  The one accessory missing that surprised me was an S-Video cable, but with the line converter and adapter the accessories included is still impressive. If you don't plan to use it, that sucker, er, potential buyer on eBay in 9 months when it's time to upgrade certainly will!

 

WinFast LEADTEK A250 LE TD GeForce4 Ti4200

Street Price:	$139.00
http://www.leadtek.com/

 

Leadtek's offering of the 4200 comes stacked with plenty of software and average accessories.  Their heat sink design if absolutely nothing else, is the most impressive of the group.  It is one mammoth wrap around sink that has active cooling over the chipset with the same cooler covering all memory on the front then wrapping around the edge of the card with sizeable sinks to also cover the rear memory.  I'm telling ya straight up, to see that massive thing in your rig is impressive.  The fact they take good care of the consumers with better than average software gives this card a nice touch.

WinFast doesn't include any game demo's, but who needs em when all of them are a mouse click away.  To come with the full version of Rogue Spear is nice and will certainly eat some of your time so beware before ya install it! 

To the best of my knowledge (couldn't confirm) this card comes with 4ns memory, which is standard for the 4200.   This card was one of the better core overclockers, but fell considerably behind in memory performance.  It took a hit in overclocked performance but was a stand out in default benchmarks across the board.  The odd thing about this card is I never suffered anomalies.   Most other cards would get to a point where overclocked to X speed they wouldn't run clean anymore and need backed down, this one went from running smooth, to nothing.  I expected it was the core reaching the max, but it was the memory.  Regardless, this cards core didn't leave you wanting for much more, at 315mhz (a 65Mhz OC) you'd be hard pressed to complain. 

With it's gutsy performance, even with the slower memory, this card quickly stood out as one of my favorites in the system.  It looked mean as hell and the results were more than respectable at default speeds.

 

 

The card offers the standard VGA, DVI-I, and S-Video outputs leaving your options wide open with this card, but to keep it from sounding too motivated, all cards in this round up offered these outputs.

I was not pleased to see that LeadTek didn't bother to include a DVI to D-Sub VGA converter.  It's a $3 part at your local PC store, but still would have been nice to see it.  They did include the standard S-Video to RCA converter and an extension RCA cable, as well as a S-Video cable. 

 

ABIT Siluro GeForce4 Ti4200

Street Price:	$137.00
www.abit-usa.com

 

Abit, the name screams performance there's no way around it.  I've run several Abit motherboards in my time and have always been pleased with their performance.  When they first released video cards I thought it was a dream come true.  They are now past those original production quantity problems and main stream.  Their 4200 continues their trend of colored PCB and they use blue for this card.  It looks sharp to say the least, but one can't help but notice the lack of any kind of memory cooling, and an average at best GPU cooler. 

Their supply of software and accessories are contradictive to be sure, none of one and plenty of the other.

You'll quickly notice the word "none" above being repetitive.  Apparently Abit is counting solely on their name to sell cards because they sure didn't make you want to buy it for the software bundle!  What they did include is accessories.  Lots of them!  In the retail package you get a  DVI to D-Sub VGA converter, an S-Video cable, a S-Video to RCA/S-Video Splitter, and an RCA extension cable.  If you're not in to extra games but don't want lack of cabling to limit the capabilities of your card, then Abit is directly targeted on you!

 

 

You'll see above that the overclockability of both memory and core is nothing shy of impressive.  What makes this feat rather odd is that the Siluro comes with the standard 4ns memory, and has no active cooling for it!  It is a prime example of the overclockers luck in action.  You can have the fastest memory known to man and it won't OC for jack, and then average memory will smoke to competition.  The card also offers the standard VGA, DVI-I, and S-Video outputs, starting to sound like a broken record aren't I?

The Abit board, while other than the blue PCB rather average looking, was no slouch in benchmarks or overclockability.  Sounds a lot like their motherboard line doesn't it?  Hey, if it ain't broke don't fix it..

 

Continue to see the rest of the cards...

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