Date:
Monday , July 29, 2002
Author:
Brent Justice
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ABIT and VisionTek GF4 Ti 4200

We take a look at two new GeForce4 Ti 4200 video cards. One from ABIT and one from VisionTek comparing the 64MB version to the 128MB version.

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Test Setup

AMD Platform

MSI K7T 266 Pro 2 (VIA KT266A)

AMD Athlon XP 1800+

Coolermaster HHC-001

1x Corsair 256MB XMS3000 DDR SDRAM

3Com 905CX-TXNM 10/100 PCI

Maxtor 40GB ATA/133

Windows XP Professional

DirectX 8.1

VIA 4n1 4.40(a)P3

A mainstream system for mainstream cards; the KT266A goes well with an Athlon XP 1800+ to match these video cards. Driver version 29.42 WHQL was used for the two GeForce4 Ti4200's.

In all the graphs the core and memory speed are marked where appropriate; for the Anti-Aliasing results all scores were done at default core/memory for each card respectively. The overclocked speeds on the ABIT Siluro Ti 4200 was 305/610. On the VisionTek Xtasy Ti 4200 the overclocked speeds were 320/580.

Driver CD's

ABIT Ti 4200

ABIT has a menu that pops up when the CD is inserted letting you select with ease what programs to install. If you click on “Driver Install” it will proceed to install driver version 28.32. Siluro DVD is ABIT’s own DVD player software. There is a very detailed online manual in the form of a .PDF included. It goes into complete detail on hardware and software setup and function. If you click on VGA Utility you will get an option to install the NVFlash utility to flash the BIOS on the video card itself.

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VisionTek Ti 4200

The VisionTek’s driver CD when inserted does not have any kind of install menu; instead it opens up as a directory view of the whole CD. On this CD is a minute and a half video visually showing you how to install your new video card. There is a brief manual in the form of a .PDF giving you a rundown of some driver features. There is also a .PDF giving you a complete rundown on nView. There are two driver sets included, 27.51 and 27.42 both outdated compared to what is out there now on NVIDIA’s site. There is one GeForce3 3D demo and a few GF4 3D demo’s included.

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3DMark2001SE

We're using the latest version 3DMark2001SE build 330 for our testing. We've ran each result with full 32bit color and 32bit textures with no compression. Z-Buffer was set to 24bit on all cards with Double Buffering.

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The ABIT Siluro Ti 4200 with 64MB of DDR is able to beat the VisionTek Ti 4200 with 128MB DDR showing that its faster DDR speed giving it more bandwidth is beneficial in this benchmark. However, when we introduce 2X Anti-Aliasing we find that in 1280x1024 and 1600x1200 the added size of 128MB is beneficial even though the DDR bandwidth is slower. At 4X AA the 64MB card is not able to run the 1600x1200 test because it lacks sufficient frame buffer for that high of a resolution with AA. Overclocking seems to help quite a bit bringing these cards up past the 10K mark at 1024x768. 3DMark2001SE seems to like a higher core speed and more RAM rather then memory bandwidth as is shown here. The ABIT card is clocked at 305Mhz core with 610Mhz memory while the core on the VisionTek card is 320 but it’s memory is only 580Mhz. So the combination of more RAM and faster core has more of an impact for 3DMark2001SE.