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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
Chaintech GeForce4 Ti4600 |
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Is that your video
card, or are you just happy to see me |
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As these
pictures can attest, this is simply a great looking card. At
first, I wasn't sure if I should install it into my test
rig, or put it on a large rope chain and wear it around my
neck a la Mr. T! It sports a standard 15-pin VGA
connector as well
as an S-Video port for connection to a TV, and a DVI-I port,
all on
a golden colored bracket. The 128MB of DDR memory consists
of 8 Samsung 2.8ns memory modules populating both sides of
the PCB. If you do the math 2.8ns modules should be able to
run at about 714 MHz, but we will save the overclocking
portion of this review
until later. The
chips are cooled with polished heatsinks that have the Chaintech and GeForce 4 logos embossed on
the front two. Also, the front two memory heatsinks are of
the raised fin-type variety, while the two on the back are
just plates, but everything helps when using such high-speed
memory. Checking their website, I noticed that the A-GT60,
the "standard" model of the GF4 TI 4600 Chaintech offers, does not
have memory heatsinks at all.
As I mentioned earlier, the card
is longer than what I was accustomed to seeing. This really
didn't cause any problems though, as this length is expected with
all of the GeForce 4 TI 4600 cards, and it fit properly into
our test rig. After we got the card in
and started up Windows XP, we installed NVIDIA's Reference
Drivers Version 28.32 to get it fired up and ready to rock.
These are the latest official drivers released by NVIDIA. I won't bore you with the particulars save to say we
left all settings at their defaults except when changing the
Anti-Aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering settings.
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Screenshots |
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An quick appetizer
before the main meal |
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I thought it
would be cool to give you all a little eye-candy before
getting to the tests. Below are two shots, one from a
graphically marvelous game called Dungeon Siege, and the
other from the equally gorgeous Jedi Knight II : Outcast.
In the former, check out the
level of detail in the characters, as well as the broken
down cart and especially the surrounding foliage. In the
latter, the lighting effects (especially the laser-cast glow
on Jan Ors on the right) steal the show. Also check out
the mountains in the background. No blurriness or jagged
landscapes here. Both of these shots were taken at 1024x768, with
4x AA and 2x Anisotropic Filtering enabled, with all in-game
graphical settings set to their maximum. The great thing is, neither
game suffered in the framerate department when using these
settings.
Test
Setup, Quake 3 With and Without AA and Anisotropic Filtering
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