Gainward GF4 Ti4200 - It's a monster.
Written: Jun 17 '02 (Updated Dec 29 '02)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Big performance, small price, strong software bundle
Cons: A very 'no frills' card. No DVI or Video In/Out, not Golden Sample
The Bottom Line: A big performer with a relatively small price tag. If you can overlook the lack of frills, the card's performance speaks for itself.
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| Action_Snark's Full Review: Gainward CARDEXpert (4 MB) AGP Video Card |
Unless you totally missed the title of this review, you should know that I'm not writing about the Card Expert 4mb VGA card. Rather, I'm reviewing it's demonaic spawn, the GeForce4 650 Power Pack (64mb).
First off, I need to explain a bit about the different GeForce4 cards Gainward offers. There are three flavors of Geforce4 boards on the market right now (Not counting the abysmal 'budget' MX boards.) the Ti4200, 4400, and 4600. The 4200 is considered the 'bargain' board, while the 4400 is the midlevel board, and the 4600 the performance board. This review is of the 'bare bones' Ti4200, with no TV or DVI out, and 64mb of memory. Oh, and this is a non 'Golden Sample' card. (More about Golden Sample later.)
The Card: The card itself is actually pretty striking to look at. Gainward has gone with a striking firey red for it's board color, instead of the usual pedestrian lime green. The PCB (Printed Circuit Board) color probably doesn't mean a whole lot to 98% of users out there, but if you wacky case modders want a flashy card to show off through the window, this is it. The board's dimensions and layout looks a lot like Gainward's Geforce3 card, mostly because the Ti4200 still uses a 6 layer board instead of the more expensive 8 layer boards. The chipset cooler is a stunted 'orb' style cooler, with a fan sitting in the center of a circular heat sink. The card is shorter than it's bigger brothers, which can be a consideration for some, as it was for me. (My FIC motherboard makes life difficult on long AGP cards.)
The Install: Install was pretty much child's play. Power down and unplug the box, (Never work on a hot system.) unplug the VGA out, unscrew and pop loose the old card, drop in and screw the new board in. Plug the monitor back in, boot up, and away you go. Windows XP had no trouble with the card, and after I installed drivers, things sailed smoothly. I went with the standard nVidia reference drivers (28.32's I had lying around. Haven't gotten around to getting the latest release yet.), as opposed to the drivers bundled with the card, as the nVidia drivers tend to be several generations ahead of anything a company has tweaked specifically for their cards. I have yet to put the card through it's paces under linux. I doubt that it will have any problems, as the nVidia driver set is a unified package. I'm certain some 31337 hax0ring of config files will be needed, but that's to be expected with linux in general, and Slackware (my distro of choice) in particular.
Performance: Unfortunately, I haven't gotten around to putting my system through the 3dmark crucible lately, so I have no hard numbers to give in the performance department. I've been far too busy enjoying incredibly smooth framerates. D3D and openGL performance are awesome, and this card will chew it's way through pretty much any current generation game without batting an eye. I attempted to stress the card by putting it through it's paces on the most graphically demanding FPS's I had on my box. Running at 1280x1024x32, Serious Sam 2, Jedi Knight 2, and Medal of Honor: Allied Assault didn't come close to redlining this card. Even with trilinear filtering and max detail, both JKII and MOH:AA (Both Quake III engine based games) ran smooth as silk, with no trace of stuttering or bog down. I glimpsed a single small artifact in MOH:AA, but it was corrected after a second or two. Serious Sam 2's "Serious Engine" was happily churning out blistering framerates at detail and resolution levels that would make my old GF2 GTS curl up into a ball and simper like a kicked puppy.
Desktop and application performance was pretty much unchanged, but I don't run very many graphically demanding desktop apps, so the application/desktop performance was difference was negligible to me. DVD decoding is top notch, with zero slowdown and/or onscreen crud. The GF4 also seemed much happier about running DVD video in a window than my GF2 was.
Number Crunching and Golden Sample Ok, the nuts and bolts on the GeForce 4 cards: The chipset is the new NV25 chipset, and the card runs at AGP 4x speed. It's fully DirectX 8.1, OpenGL, and DirectDraw compliant. Now, the big difference in the performance levels of the Ti4200, Ti4400, and Ti4600 is in the clock speeds and memory bandwidth.
Take for example, the card I am reviewing. The clock and memory both run at 250 mhz, and the card has a total of 8.0 gb/s of total memory bandwidth. Now, it's bigger brother, the GeForce4 Ti 4600, runs at 300/325 GPU/Clock speed, with a grand total of 10.4 gb/s of memory bandwidth on 128mb of DDR. Both cards use Samsung DDR memory, but the Ti4200 uses the 3.5ns latency flavor. This means that the Ti4200 has a lot of headroom for overclocking. Now, speaking of Overclocking, this is where that enigmatic "Golden Sample" thingy comes in.
Golden Sample is a feature unique to certian models of Gainward cards. Basically, Golden Sample is factory supported overclocking. If you purchase a Golden Sample card, included in the software bundle will be a handy little software tool that will allow you to incrementally bump your GPU/memory speeds. So long as you don't bump your speeds past limits set forth by Gainward, your warranty will not be voided if your card gets fried while overclocked. This is a first in the industry, as overclockers have traditionally been on their own in taking their hardware past the limits set by the manufacturer. The Ti4200 can be overclocked to GPU/Memory speeds approaching that of the Ti4600 without voiding the warranty. Performance is not on par with the Ti4600 card, but a maxed out O/C on a Ti4200 will be able to edge out a stock 4400 in most instances.
Software bundle: The software bundle is not stellar, but is pretty good. Included is a drivers/utility disk, which includes the Gainward EXPERTool utility, which can be used to overclock Golden Sample cards. The Power Pack (Retail) version that I purchased also included a free copy of CyberLink's excellent PowerDVD program. PowerDVD is widely regarded as one of, if not the best pieces of DVD viewing software on the market, and it's inclusion in the software bundle is all the more reason to purchase this card.
Overall: Overall, I'm going to whack a big, fat seal of approval on the Gainward GeForce4 Ti4200 (64mb DDR) VGA card. While the card I got is pretty plain as far as Gainward cards go (no DVI, Video out, or Golden Sample capabilities) at $154.00 on Newegg.com, the performance can't be beat. This card is a real leviathan, and it won't break the bank. The software bundle is pretty strong for such a bargain card, and shelling out the extra $45.00 to go to the 128mb Golden Sample version would probably be the smart thing to do. (I'm regretting not doing it already. I don't need the extra horsepower now, but when Deus Ex 2 and Doom 3 hit the shelves, I probably could use it.) The 64mb/CRT only version that I purchased is still a great card however. It provides a huge amount of bang for the buck, and does away with the features I don't need. If you're looking for a beastly card with no frills on it, then definitely give this card a second look.
Update Well, I've recently discovered some rather disturbing news about these cards. Apparently, Gainward has been shipping defective cards for quite some time. My card started suddenly having a 'pink screen of death' error. Pretty much any OpenGL or accelerated graphics application (DVD video, etc.) was like playing russian roulette. It was only a matter of time before the hammer dropped on the wrong cylinder, and I wound up having to cold-boot my system to get my display uncorrupted.
The problem seems limited mostly to batches of 64 and 128mb ti4200 cards bought from Newegg.com, with 64mb non 'golden sample' cards being the worst offenders. Gainward has been quietly RMAing 'pink screen' problem cards, even ones which have had their warranties voided.
While these problem cards are mostly off the market, and gainward is working hard to get consumers stuck with a bum card a new one, it's still a caveat for those of you considering the card.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 154.00
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Action_Snark
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