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- Date:
- Wednesday, July 24, 2002
- Author:
- Steve Lynch
- Editor:
- Sean Quinn
- Google +1
ASUS V8420 Ti4200 Deluxe
The V8420 is a Ti4200 with a serious identity crisis. It looks like a Ti4400and it performs like one, but it costs less and comes with a ton of features the Ti4400 doesn't come with...oh yeah, it's a budget card too.
ASUS, has been in the game far longer than most people realize. Let's take you on a little trivia tour here to demonstrate just how far back ASUS goes. 13yrs ago ASUS opened their doors and within 5yrs, they put out the first dual Pentium board on the market. A couple years later they are expanding into notebooks and other areas of the PC market. 1999 rolls around and ASUS, again true to form, released the first Riva TNT2 based video card with 3D Glasses. Eventually the same year ASUS would release the first 50X CD-ROM and garner recognition throughout the industry as one of the giants in the multimedia market. ASUS wasn't just a motherboard maker anymore. Well, here they are, years later, with global operations and over 5000 employees...
...and yes, they still bundle the same 3D Glasses.
We have talked before about the fact that there is literally a sea of different manufacturers that produce identical cards, made from identical chipsets, but under different company names. ASUS has recognized this with their Ti4200 offering and decided to go the extra mile with their product. What is the "Extra Mile"? Well, based on the statements I made in previous Ti4200 articles, there are only a few things that should influence your purchase when considering a Ti4200.
1.) The low price card is offering you the same video card as most of the other manufacturers simply at a lower price. Whodathunkit? Often these cards come with little more than an installation CD. Profits are made through volume sales.
2.) The card offering the large bundles and extras often use the added value of the bundled games, programs, and utilities to lure in potential buyers. These cards often include other added features like the aftermarket heatsinks, video out and in configurations, and colored PCBs to help entice customers who like the flashy cards.
What category does ASUS fall into? Well.... a little of both, and then some of their own. ASUS has decided this time around that they are not only going to bundle the games, include the flashy PCB coloring and killer looking heatsinks, but they decided to go one step further and bring you their Ti4200 on the same platform the Ti4400 and Ti4600 comes on. The bigger PCB and the 128MB of BGA memory give the Ti4200 the look of the big boys to go along with the bells and the whistles....let's see how it compares to other Ti4200 cards and see if it is size that matters.
Pentium® 4/III/II/Celeron™, AMD® Athlon® with AGP 2X/4X universal slot 64MB of system memory Installation software requires CD-ROM
The nVIDIA nfiniteFX™ II Engine enable a virtually infinite number of special effects that deliver the next leap in realism to 3D graphics
Dual programmable Vertex Shaders Advanced programmable Pixel Shaders nVIDIA Lightspeed Memory Architecture™ II nVIDIA Accuview™ Antialiasing 3D Textures Shadow Buffers 4 dual-rendering pipelines 8 texels per clock cycle Dual cube environment mapping 128MB high-speed DDR RAM memory High-Definition Video
Processor (HDVP) AGP 4X with Fast Writes AGP 4X / 2X and AGP Texturing support 32-bit color with 32-bit Z/stencil buffer Z-correct true, reflective bump mapping
High-performance 2D rendering engine Hardware accelerated real-time shadows True-color hardware cursor Integrated hardware transform engine Integrated hardware
lighting engine High-quality HDTV/DVD playback TV-Out and Video Modules Multibuffering (double, triple, quad) for smooth animation and video playback
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NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4200 GPU 260MHz core clock
128MB DDR memory 550MHz DDR memory clock ( BGA )
AGP 4x compatible with fast writes Microsoft DirectX® and S3TC® texture compression nVIDIA Unified Driver Architecture (UDA) Up to 8 GB/sec. memory bandwidth 113 Million triangles/sec. setup engine 4.0 billion AA sample/sec. fill rate 1.03 trillion operations/sec.
Windows® 98/98SE Windows® Me Windows® 2000 Windows® XP
CRT Monitor: 15-pin VGA connector S Video / TV In-Out DVI-I (flat panel display) support
640x480 8/16/32bit @ 150Hz 800x600 8/16/32bit @ 150Hz 1024x768 8/16/32bit @ 120Hz 1152x864 8/16/32bit @ 120Hz 1280x1024 8/16/32bit @ 100Hz 1600x1200 8/16/32bit @ 85Hz 1920x1200 8/16/32bit @ 75Hz 2048x1536 8/16/32bit @ 60Hz
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The Card:
The ASUS V8420 Deluxe is a notch up from the smaller mainstream Ti4200 cards we have seen in the past. The purple PCB complimented with the snazzy gold heatsink do add to the cosmetic appeal of the card, although not as much as having the larger 8 layer PCB design akin to the Ti4400 and 4600. Although the actual size of the GF4 Ti4400 / 4600 was initially criticized by some, I have to admit it does add to the "deluxe" feel of a Ti4200 card.
Gone are the TSOP (Thin Small Outline Package) memory modules making way for the BGA (Ball Grid Array) memory on the Deluxe card. Other Ti4200 cards utilized the smaller 6 layer PCB design and TSOP memory because the Ti4200 was originally intended to be a budget card. ASUS has realized that with a few minor adjustments and added features coupled with having the looks of the purple PCB and the cosmetic flash of the glitzy heatsink, this card can appeal to a very wide audience.
If you were wondering whether or not they had the larger PCB in mind from the beginning when they made the Ti4200...probably not, they use the same boards for all Ti based cards.