ABIT Siluro GF4 Ti4200-8X OTES
I previously reviewed ABIT's enthusiast Ti 4200 a few months ago. Called OTES (Outside Thermal Exhaust System), ABIT decided to devise their own method of cooling the GPU. The upshot of this was the ability to pre-clock their Ti 4200s, when equipped with the OTES cooling solution, to higher frequencies than competing cards. What's changed between cards ?
The box remains largely the same. ABIT, somewhat surprisingly, seem to keep rather understated boxes. You can clearly see that this is the 128MB DDR 8x AGP version with TV-Out and DVI support.
Looking at the card itself now.
The GPU cooling system centres around the enclosed fan and heatpipe in the centre of the above picture. The basic idea is to push all the hot air from the GPU, transferred via a copper-clad heatsink, to the rear of the card. The heatpipe works in a phase-change manner. The liquid-filled pipe is soldered on to the copper base. As the base gets warm the heat is absorbed by the liquid in the pipe. Efficient absorption leads to the liquid heating up and turning into vapour.
The resulting heat is released further down the pipe (as the vapour travels down) where it meets the fins and is channeled out of the back. The loss of heat causes the vapour to reform as a liquid, travel back down to the start of the pipe, and start the process over again. It's like a mini-VapoChill in that respect. The critical aspect, however, is to ensure that liquid evaporation doesn't take place too soon or too late in the cycle.
The aforementioned heat is channeled out of the fins at the back. In operation, a steady warm gust of air is continually pushed out of the back of the card. Due to its design, the rear of the card is double the standard height with the HD15 and DVI connectors on different levels. You do lose a PCI slot with ABIT's extravagant cooling The TV-Out you see is fed from a Philips SAA7104E chip. Unlike some others on test, it only has the ability to output signals (1280x1024) with no video-in function.
With ABIT going to the lengths they have to effectively cool the GPU, it seems a little odd that the RAM is left bare. We've seen the MSI card use a total GPU and RAM cooler. However, ABIT do use faster RAM than most with Samsung modules rated at 3.6ns. Others that have left their RAM bare have sometimes used 4.0ns RAM from varying manufacturers.
A decent instruction manual, ABIT-branded WinDVD player, drivers, and the reasonable America's Army is included. I really had hoped to see a little more in the way of bundled software. The cabling, though, is first class. ABIT include as splitter that provides both RCA and S-Video out. Generous lengths of extended cabling allow you to further increase the range of either output option. ABIT also bundle the all-important DVI-to-VGA dongle.
