Gainward's award winning High-Peformance/Wide-Bandwidth™
hardware design integrating NVIDIA's latest GeForce™4
Ti 4200-8X graphics processor and 128MB of the fastest DDR memory
Gainward's unique red powerful cooling Fan
Gainward's unique red cool heat sink
Gainward's "Golden Sample™" products guarantee
outstanding stability and performance.
Support Video capture from TV, VCR, DV or camcorder with Composite
and S-Video connectors
Providing a video-out connector or flicker free functionality
both composite video and s-video for PAL and NTSCT for smooth
video recording and video editing
Accelerated DVD playback with enhanced motion compensation
in hardware.
A powerful package of Video-Editing-Software is also included
Includes Gainward's EXPERTool™ utility for customized
performance enhancements and efficient desktop management. Performance
enhanced, accelerated software drivers for all major operation
systems and APIs
Easy Plug-and-Play AUTORUN installation from CD-ROM, supporting
8X, 4X, and 2X AGP.
Supports LCD output with DVI connector
Video-out support (NTSC/PAL) TV system
API Support
DirectX 8.1
Direct3D, DirectDraw , DirectVideo
OpenGL 1.3 for Windows98/98E/XP/2000/NT
OS Support
Windows95/98/98E/2000/ME/XP
Chipset Feature
Integrated NVIDIA GeForce™4 Ti 4200-8X GPU with AGP
8X
Supporting 128MB high-speed 128bit DDR RAM memory
nView™ Multi-Display Technology provides flexibility
and control for using multiple displays, supporting any combination
of desktop VGA monitors, DVI displays or TV sets
Shading Rasterizer™ Technology allows software developers
to calculate lighting characteristics on a per-pixel basis in
real time
Integrated Lightspeed Memory Architecture (LMA) II increases
memory bandwidth efficiency for unmatched performance
Accuview Antialiasing™ delivers unbeatable visual quality
and frames rates
Video Processing Engine (VPE) enables the highest-quality,
full-frame rate, full-screen HDTV and DVD without requiring
a high-performance CPU
Integrated Second-Generation Transform and Lighting Engine
(T&L) provide a powerful, balanced PC platform and enable
scenes with extremely high polygon counts
Digital Vibrancy Control™ Technology can adjust color
controls digitally to compensate for the lighting conditions
Integrated 32-bit color and 32-bit Z/stencil Buffer
Support Video Playback Architecture The video scalar function
provides the ability to render a video stream in a YUVcolor
space onto an RGB graphics display, either within a window or
a full screen. It supports YUV overlay surfaces in off-screen
memory.
AGP 3.0 support for 8x and 4x and AGP 2.0 support for 4x,
2x, 1x
System Requirements
Intel Pentium II/Pentium III or compatible CPUs
64MB System Memory or above
AGP Slot (AGP version)
CD-ROM Drive
Although this card supports AGP8x I will not conduct
the benchmarks or any other tests in this mode, and here is why: The reason for this decision was that there is no significant
difference between AGP 2.0 and AGP 3.0 standards. Though the improved
AGP bus has doubled its bandwidth to 2.1 GB/s, the performance
increase is simply non-existent. The next generation graphics
cards (NV40, R400) will most likely take better advantage of the
AGP 3.0 standard.
Board Layout
And this is how our "Red Devil" presents.
The card is much shorter because it does not need as much power
as a Ti4600/4400, thus most capacitors were eliminated and the
board was shortened. Notice the RAM sinks. Those are not available
on some other similar class cards (at least the first revisions).
I will talk about the heatsinks in more detail in a second. As
usual, Gainward is sporting their sexy red 8-layered PCB. To the
left of the cooler we have the VIVO and DVI chips.
And here is our bracket: VGA (HD-15 port), VIDEO
(S-Video port) and DVI-I port (from left to right). Almost all
Geforce 4 Ti's have a similar setup, though not all have VIVO
capabilities :) As mentioned before, Gainward's XP feature provides
two video-in and two video-out connectors (both composite video
and s-video for PAL and NTSC). More about this in the next section.
Here is a Ti4600 for comparison:
And here are both cards:
Let's take a look at the details...
Ti4200:
Ti4600:
Ti4200:
Ti4600:
Some of you will probably disagree but I like Gainward's sturdy
heatsinks. As you can see it is very similar to the Ti4600 cooler.
I would be even a happier camper to see Gainward use copper based
heatsink (which would dissipate the heat even better) as this
one appears to be nickel plated. As you can see, the top RAM sinks
on the Ti4200 needed to be modified for the capacitors to fit
in. Good luck replacing those with your own.
Now let's take a look at the back of the card. It's not much different
from the older version (with AGP4x). Notice the RAM sinks here
as well. If you don't have those and you are overclocking your
card...GET THEM, they do help.
The PCB is flawless. I have looked at it thoroughly and haven't
found any potential problems.
Ti4200:
Ti4600:
Here you can see the anodized red RAM sinks that match the PCB
color. Those custom-made heatsinks are not the same as on my Ti4600.
They are much wider and shorter, but seem to dissipate the same
amount of heat. Underneath them you will find Samsung's TSOP2
DDR SDRAM. It's not BGA based memory as most of the newest Geforce
4's use but it still overclocks pretty well. The memory is rated
at 3.6 nanoseconds (~550 MHz, although this Ti comes clocked at
513MHz)
