The Bundle
The box itself is a representation of the graphics card industry today. The suitably impressive graphics seek to demonstrate the power of the card contained within. The 128MB of onboard memory is proudly emblazoned on the cover.
The software bundle is extremely impressive to say the least. You receive no less than 10 individual CDs, far surpassing the Creative Ti 4600's meek effort. You are provided with full retail editions of the excellent No One Lives Forever, the visually impressive Aquanox, and Shiny's excellent Sacrifice. All three are quality titles that have previously justified a full retail price of £25 each.
Not content with three excellent games, you are also furnished with seven demos including amongst others, Serious Sam, Comanche, Ghost Recon, and Swat 3.
You are also supplied with MSI's decent DVD software program. We've mentioned that the MSI Ti 4600 has VIVO capability courtesy of the Philips SAA710E chip, we see it being put to good use via the supplied S-VHS cable (6-foot long), extension cable and 9-pin mini-extended connector. To help users get the most out of the added functionality, MSI have also bundled a full versions of InterVideo's WinProducer 2.0 and WinCoder 2.0. These allow you to transfer signal from DV/D8/V8 sources to MPEG1/MPEG2/VCD. You can also output AVI/MPEG1/MPEG2 to a TV or external recording source. We tried using the TV-Out to a Mitsubishi 28" TV. The results were sharp, clear and eminently watchable.
Much like the reference Ti 4600, the MSI has excellent 2D at all resolutions, something NVIDIA have worked hard on. I use a relatively high-end monitor in the Sony G500 21" flatscreen. The text and images produced by the MSI are subjectively excellent at my regular resolution of 1600x1200x32 85Hz. Even raising the resolution to 2048x1536x32 incurred little loss in focus. I've previously owned an ATI Radeon 8500, and feel that the MSI Ti4600 is at least as good as, if not better than, the R8500 at all things 2D related.
Dual TMDS' allow you to use dual displays without undue problems. We connected up two monitors and quickly effortlessly nView, NVIDIA's dual display program. The quality of the second, external TMDS ensured that both displays were crystal clear at high resolutions.
The manual deserves a mention. It is well written, easy to follow, and delves into detail when necessary. Most novice users will appreciate this fact greatly. The supplied drivers, somewhat understandably, weren't the most efficient. A quick download of the 28.32s at NVIDIA's site soon cured that little problem.
The overall bundle is reassuringly impressive, one shouldn't expect anything less when purchasing a flagship video card. When spending £300 or so, we expect features as well as speed. MSI deliver on both of these counts.
