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We aren't going
to bother covering the drivers for this card.
You've seen
them several times here in previous articles.
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Setup
and Installation of the
Abit Siluro
GeForce 4 Ti 4200 |
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Is that your video
card, or are you just happy to see me |
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Here we have our
first glimpses of the card. As you can see, it?s got a
sturdy looking heatsink/fan covering the NV25 GPU, and 64MB
of Hynix 4ns DDR memory, all set against a blue PCB. To save
costs, and therefore pass them on to the customer, the card
consists of a 6 layer PCB as opposed to the 8 layer PCB used
on the Ti 4400 and Ti 4600. There are also fewer capacitors
populating the board, since perhaps less voltage regulation
circuitry is needed due to the lower clocked CPU and memory.
There also aren?t any heatsinks on the memory chips, but
this isn?t really holding back this card from overclocking,
as you will see later on in this review.
Oddly, you might
also notice that there is a small capacitor between the DDR
chips, which makes it harder to place after-market heatsinks,
like the ones put out by Thermaltake onto the RAM properly,
unless you cut the heatsinksin half. On the bracket, we
found the typical 15-pin VGA and S-Video ports, as well as a
DVI connection. We pulled off the Heat Sink and Fan assembly
for a quick check and were relieved to see that they applied
a nice layer of thermal paste for proper heat dissipation.
Also, the card is noticeably shorter than its cousins by a
good two inches.
Installation was
a snap as usual. Users will simply take the old card out,
put in the new, and let Windows do its voodoo, after you
feed it the driver CD. We used Nvidia Reference drivers,
version 28.32, which is the latest ?official? release of
their Detonator XP series. The system was set at 1024x768,
32-bit color, and V-Sync was turned off. By default, Windows
XP loads the desktop with the best visual appearance
settings, which could adversely affect the benchmarks. With
our test system, we set the desktop settings for "best
performance" to reduce any unnecessary load. Once this was
all done, we went on our merry way to benchmark this card in
OpenGL and DirectX, but first we offer you a few
screenshots...
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Screenshots |
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An quick appetizer
before the main meal |
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Since there have
been a number of great movies coming out, I thought I would
post some pics from related games such as Activision?s
Spiderman ? The Movie, and Lucasart?s Jedi Knight 2, as well
as the final boss from Microsoft?s Dungeon Siege.
While they may
look like they were taken from cutscenes, rest assured that
these are all in-game shots. For each of them, I had all
graphics settings turned to the maximum at 1280x1024
resolution, with 4x anti-aliasing and 32-tap Anisotropic
filtering being used.
Test
Setup, Quake 3 With and Without AA and Anisotropic Filtering
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