OCSystem's Enhanced GeForce4 Ti4200 - Conclusion
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OCSystem's Enhanced GeForce4 Ti4200 128MB DDR
Manufacturer: OCSystem
Price: $215 as tested
Availability: Now
Written by: Chad (Memphist0)
Reviewed: September, 2002
Edited by: Mack (SPeeD)
Performance Continued
Well let's more on to some OpenGL benchmarks. Starting it off with the aged Quake III Arena demo001 run at the default HQ settings.
You can clearly see that the Quake benchmark isn't quite what it used to be considering all the video cards and settings were able to achieve over 300 frames per second. The OCS Ti4200+ does win this benchmark by 1.5 and 6.1 frames per second. Again, I believe the high GPU speed is why it was able to pull out the win.
Next we have one of my favorite and often overlooked benchmarks GLexcess. All 16 tests were run.
Here the OCS Ti4200 fell about 3.5% behind the overclocked Ti4400. Another case of the memory bandwidth of the overclocked Ti4400 being able to distance itself from the OCS Ti4200.
Ummm, I'm not sure what happened here. The slowest card was able to outperform both of the others. I reran the benchmark several times getting pretty much the same results.
Now let's see what nVidia's own ChameleonMark benchmark has to say about the OCS Ti4200.
This benchmark scaled pretty much how I suspected. The OCS Ti4200 was able to pull out an easy win in all three areas.
Conclusion
The OCSystem's Enhanced GeForce4 Ti4200+ performed as advertised. It was able to keep up with and win several of the tests between itself and the overclocked Ti4400 @ 300/670. I was concerned the card would become unstable due to its high overclock and was pleasantly surprised to see no signs of tearing or any other problems. I would recommend you have decent case cooling to run this video card but nothing extravagant. Of course I would also say this for just about any decent video card.
So what does this boil down to? Well out of the box this is the fastest GeForce4 that exists. I have never seen a Ti4200 or Ti4400 achieve the GPU overclocked speed of 320MHz that the OCSystem card comes set at. By purchasing a OCSystem 'Enhanced' video card you already know what the overclocked speed of your card will be. Additionally, OCSystem has optimized the video card bios settings. So even if another card was able to achieve the same overclock it wouldn't be able to perform at the same levels.
If your like me your also thinking that an overclocked version of the Ti4600 would be able to beat it. Luckily OCSystem has already thought of this. They have an 'Enhanced' version of the Ti4400 and Ti4600. As well as, 'Enhanced' versions of the ATi Radeon 8500 in 64MB and 128MB flavors.
Highs
- Best overclock of a GeForce4 Ti4200 I've ever seen
- Able to win its fair share of benchmarks against a Ti4600 like card
- Excellent cooling equipment
- Great attention to detail, ie. the use of Artic Silver 3
Lows
- The Ti4200 just doesn't have fast enough memory to win every benchmark
- Sparse packaging, no games or box - not really needed but for some reason it always gives me a warm fuzzy
- Price
Rating
8 out of 10.
Thanks to OCSystem for providing their video card for the review.
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