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As
we enter the latest phase in the nVidia vs. ATi battle,
the focus again is on who's video card is going to be the
all out fastest. It's natural that we get caught up
in the hype of who has the faster card, but the bottom
line is you only need the fastest card, if gaming is your
life and you have some money to burn. What is
unfortunate is that we tend to lose sight of the fact that
both companies have existing products that are a better
over all value. What were yesterday's top
contenders, are today's mid-range to value cards that can
offer performance on the cheap. The deciding factor
all comes down to longevity. Sure, you can pick up a
Ti4600 or Radeon 8500 for half the price of their current
successors, but they will become obsolete quicker than the
newer cards. On the flip-side, you can pick up the
top of the line card and pay a premium and expect that
card to have a longer lifespan. The choice is
ultimately yours. The one thing that makes the
slightly older cards more attractive is the evolution
they've under gone. As a new model card begins to
settle into the market, manufacturers tend to rework,
tweak and modify them, allowing them to sell revamped,
more robust editions in the future. Current Radeon
8500s and GeForce4s have already run this course and have
evolved into mature, refined cards that prove to be quite
attractive. Such is the case with this MSI Ti4600
VT2D8X graphics card.
The
latest rendition of MSI's Ti4600 has undergone the same
evolution as we mentioned above. Previously Ti4600s
were found with stock coolers and support for AGP4X.
Today the trend has shifted toward AGP8X compatibility and
customized cooling designs aimed at keeping the card
cooler, and in the case of the VT2D8X, quieter. So
we are going to set aside the hype over the latest high
end offerings from ATi and nVidia for a moment and take a
look at the
MSI
Ti4600 VT2D8X video card to see if it is still worthy of
your consideration.
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Specifications and Features of the MSI
GeForce4 Ti4600-VT2D8X |
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GeForce4 Power. |
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MSI
GeForce4 Ti 4600-VT2D8X with T.O.P cooling:
- 300MHz GPU
- DV, TV In/Out
- 256-bit
Graphics Accelerator
- 1.23 trillion
operations/sec.
Nvidia nfiniteFX II Engine:
- Dual
programmable Vertex Shaders, faster Pixel
Shaders and 3D textures give developers the
freedom to program a virtually infinite number
of custom special effects never seen before
and gives you the power to play true-to-life
characters in hyper-realistic environments. At
twice the performance of GeForce3, Xtasy Ti
4600 delivers the most realistic game play
available.
Lightspeed Memory Architecture II:
- With 128-bit
DDR Lightspeed Memory Architecture II provides
nearly double the memory bandwidth of
GeForce3.
Accuview Antialiasing Engine:
-
High-performance visual quality at high frame
rates.
TV
In and Out Jack:
- TV In/Out
connector allow you to play on any size TV in
your house with an S-video connector.
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Specifications:
- Controller:
NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4600
- Bus Type AGP
- Memory 128MB
DDR
- Core Clock
300MHz
- Memory Clock
650MHz DDR memory
- RAMDAC 350MHz
- API Support
Direct-X, Open GL ICD for Windows
- Connectors
Dual-DVI, TV In/Out
- 1.23 trillion
operations/sec.
- 136 Million
triangles/sec setup
- 10.4GB/second
memory bandwidth
Features at a Glance:
- AGP 8x
compatible with fast writes
- 256-bit 3D and
2D graphics accelerator
- NVIDIA nView
display technologies
- Lightspeed
Memory Architecture II
- Accuview
Antialiasing
- High
Definition Video Processing Engine
- TV In/Out
connectors
- DVI connector
- Thermal Obviation
Protection Cooling System
(T.O.P.)
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BUNDLE:
The bundle of software
and hardware that accompanied the VT2D8X was one of the
more comprehensive arrangements we've seen in a while.
The package comes with a slew of software and a nice array
of complimentary hardware. The system comes with a
nifty MSI case badge, a DVI to VGA adapter and a
TV-Out/Video-in adapter that makes four connections out of
one. I for one am not a big fan of the types of
adapters that mount directly on the card. Especially
when we are talking about the DVI-to-VGA adapter.
Often we find that once a monitor cable is connected ,
there is a great deal of additional stress put on the
card. However, there really isn't much you can do
about physics. The same concern holds true with the
TV-Out/Video-In
1-to-4 Connecting Cable which is quite rigid and adds a
little stress of its own to the card. MSI only
includes one DVI-to-VGA adapter in the VT2D8X package.
Package Contents
GeForce4 Ti4600 8X
T.O.P Tech Cooler
DVI to VGA Adapter
TV-Out/Video-In 1-to-4 Connecting Cable
Users Manual
Setup CDs
Bundled Utilities/Games
Case Badge |
Setup CD Contents
MSI Live Update Series
3D! Turbo Experience
GoodMen
LockBox
WMIinfor
ThinSoft BeTwin
MSI Secure DOC
E-Color
Adobe Acrobat Reader
Trend Micro PC-Cillin 2000
Microsoft® DirectX 8.1 |
The VT2D8X
also comes with a fair share of applications/utilities,
some very useful and some not so good. One of the
products that initially caught my eye was MSI's own 3D
Desktop. Its main function is to change your 2D
desktop into a 3D world. At first this seemed like a
cool application that made Windows a little more fun, but
after 5 minutes, it began to lose its luster. We
found the interface a little awkward to get the hang of,
which soon turned to frustration. I think the
concept is interesting to say the least, but in the end,
it's not worth the time. Another more useful package
was Virtual Drive 7 Pro. This program lets you
create virtual drives on your system for a wide range of
uses. The biggest advantage to this is to create a
virtual CD drive that you can copy game CD's to for
improved performance.
Full-Version Games
Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon
The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind
Duke Nukem: Manhattan Project |
Lite-Version
Games
The Sum of All Fears
IL-2 Sturmovik
Serious Sam 2
Rally Trophy
Beam Breakers
Zax: The Alien Hunter
Oni |
Utilities
MSI 3D Desktop
Virtual Drive 7 Professional Version
Restore It 3 Professional Version
MSI 5.1 Channel DVD Player
Foreign Language Learning Machine |
Speaking of games, MSI
adds enough games to the VT2D8X package to keep the fun
going for hours. The bundle is really too large to
cover each piece of software in detail, but as you can
see, there is no shortage of treats. Three full
version games are included as well as 7 "lite" versions of
such greats of IL-2 Sturmovik, Serious Sam 2, and Oni.
So there is clearly a lot
of fun to be had, but a game is only as good as the video
card driving the graphics. So
now let's turn the page and take a closer look at the
VT2D8X...
The
Card...
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