Nvidia Ti4200 Review

With all the furore currently surorunding the high-end of the graphics card market, with Nvidia duking it out with Ati and, now, Matrox, we thought it was about time we took a look at what the lower(ish) end of the scale had to offer. The number of people who can afford top notch Ti4600 cards is minimal, and many people are looking for a greater ratio of bang-per-buck in their graphics card. The Ti4200 has been hailed as the overclocking king of GeForce 4s, much as the Ti200 ruled the overclocking roost of the previous generation. I'm going to keep this fairly brief, since Moose did a good job of looking over the GF4 technology with his review of the 4600. With that in mind, our buddies over at Nvidia UK shipped us over a funky reference Ti4200 card. Let's take a looksie...

 
The thing that immediately strikes about the 4200 is that it looks completely different from the 4600 and 4400. In fact, it looks much more like a Ti500 card. The Length of the card is significantly shorter than a 4600, and it uses normal RAM, not the BGA stuffs used on the newer cards. Additionally, the heatsink, without being harsh, is rather cheesy - its just a piece of metal with some bent up edges :/ There are no ramsinks on the RAM, and so cooling on the card is minimal, no doubt to help keep costs down. Of course, will that lead to some funky oc'ing?

 
The outputs are the now bog-standard VGA, DVI and TV. The Gainward 4600 we've got in our labs comes equipped with dual-DVI, but obviously the 4200 is targetted at a slightly different market.

 
This is the aforementioned heatsink. Not too hot eh?

 
You can see the standard RAM used here, no BGA in sight. The 4200 packs only 64megs of RAM as standard, rather than the 128 found on 4600s.

 
The GF4s all have the Conexant chip for TV-Out on the back of the board. All the GF3s have it on the front, not sure what the reason is for the design change? Not really sure it matters