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Asus GeForce4 Ti 4600 Ultra Deluxe

Like Copper? Like different implementations of cooling? Check out this review to see if this card lives up to its name.

Introduction:

There are a lot more third party manufacturers out there now producing video cards then there ever has been. They all choose which chipsets they want to use and build boards based on those chipsets. Because there are boards that use the exact same chipset, however, the 3D capabilities and performance are "the same" between cards. To differentiate their cards, manufacturers will often include unique features or components that identify their product and strive to make it outclass its fellow competitors. Asus is one company that has been known to cater to the enthusiast/multimedia crowd, and they aim to please once more.

Asus has been making quality video cards for quite a while now. They are known for packing as much multimedia oriented features and programs into their Deluxe series of video cards as they can. The Asus GeForce4 Ti 4600 Ultra Deluxe goes one step further by providing a robust cooling system for the GF4 Ti 4600 chipset. They say a picture speaks a thousand words...

The first thing I’m sure that will strike out at you is either the purple PCB or the large copper HSF unit. Talk about an all-in-one HSF unit, this is the largest copper HSF piece I have seen on a video card. It not only cools the core but extends to encompass the RAM as well. Yep, Asus goes even one step further by cooling the RAM on the back as well as the back of the GPU!

First the front HSF unit. I just had to see what this HSF was all about, so I took it apart to look at the insides. The fan I found is just painted a copper color and is actually plastic. But everything else is copper, from the fins to the base and housing. Underneath, Asus put a dab of thermal paste on the GPU, however they put no kind of thermal material between the RAM and HSF unit. I was hoping for at least a TIM, but nothing was there; it was pure chip to copper. The whole unit itself is held on by two spring loaded push pins.

The back heatsink covers all 4 RAM chips as well as having a piece of copper that protrudes out with a thermal pad on it making contact with the back of the GPU. There are two problems however with their implementation of this heatsink backing. There is again no thermal paste or thermal pads between the heatsink and the RAM chips. Next, if you look at my last picture, you will see where the red arrow is pointing to. There are two RAM chips on this side that do not make full contact with the heatsink here. If you noticed in the picture of the underside of the heatsink, there is another piece that protrudes with a pad on it. That piece helps keep the heatsink off the PCB. However, it protrudes too much in this case, making the whole heatsink tilt a bit. This tilt makes the heatsink only come into contact with the edges of the RAM chips on that one end. Also because of this tilt, the other two RAM chips may not be getting enough pressure to efficiently have proper thermal transfer.

Seeing that it is very improbable that all four chips are actually on the same plane, a one-piece cooling system like this seems very hard to implement properly.

As you can see, the thermal paste on the GPU doesn’t actually cover the whole GPU. The RAM on board is Samsung 2.8ns chips. There is also one jumper on this board labeled TV Mode. This lets you select between PAL or NTSC.

You will find the standard VGA port and DVI port, but there is also a port called TV. This lets you hook up the multimedia break out box you also find pictured here. With this you have full VIVO, S-Video, and Composite In and Out. There is also a provided DVI cable that splits off into one VGA and one DVI port allowing you to have Dual VGA support. Also, we cannot forget the VR glasses with Asus’s Deluxe cards. This time they have gone blue.

The gaming package included is known as Quadforce. Inside you will find the full version game of Aquanox and Midnight GT Rage Rally. Another disc is included giving you some demos of Rally Championship Xtreme, Comanche 4, Delta Force Land Warrior, Colin Mcrae Rally 2.0, Operation Flashpoint, and finally Incoming Forces (which looks awesome on this card btw). There are also 3 productivity CDs included, Asus DVD 2000, Cyberlinks Video Live Mail 4 and WinCoder/WinProducer for video editing.

Specs:

Model

- V8460 Ultra/Deluxe: GeForce4 Ti VGA, 128M DDR Memory, TV-out, DVI, Video-in, 3D glasses

- NVIDIA GeForce 4 Ti 4600 GPU

- Engine Clock: 300Mhz

- 128MB DDR Video Memory

- Memory Clock: 650Mhz DDR

- Memory Bandwidth: 10.4 GB/sec

- Fill Rate (AA Samples/sec.) 4.8 Billion

- Triangles/sec. 86 Million

- Operations/sec. 1.23 Trillion

- RAMDAC: 350Mhz

- Full VIP 1.1 Interface on Video Port

- AGP 4X/2X/1X

- Hardware color space conversion and filtering (YUV 4:2:2 and 4:2:0)

- 15-pin D-sub VGA connector

- One S-VHS mini-DIN, and one RCA jack to mini-DIN cable

- VR Glasses connector