Overclocking
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Gainward have always pushed the overclockability of their graphics cards as a major feature. Here I hope to see just how far the Ti4200 can go with stability still included. Unfortunately any scores gleaned here will be hindered by the unnatural good UK weather but it should still give us an accurate representation on just how far this card can go. Gainward do include a overclocking tool with their bundle, but I prefer to use RivaTuner as it meets my needs and I am use to working with it. I will overclock the card as far as I can without changing the CPU/Ram speeds of the main PC and then compare them against the Gainward Ti4600 card at default speeds. Settings are completely as before with the benchmarking. No driver tweaks shall be introduced only v-sync shall be turned off and LOD bias set to 0. As with overclocking anything for the first time its best to increase each component individually In this case the Core speed and the ram speed. Starting off small I used the drago high and low tests along with the nature tests in MadOnion's 3DMark2001SE to test the stability of the card at each speed increment. These are known to be the harshest benchmarks on the GPU. Starting off with the core, its default speed being 250mhz. The method I always use when overclocking anything for the first time is to pick an amount to increment by for each test. Then when the computer crashes (hangs, reboots etc) I then back it off to the last stable speed and then take it up by 1mhz at a time. For the Ti4200 core I decided to go up in 10mhz increases to start off with. Now explaining overclocking isn't nearly as exciting as actually doing it, so believe me when I say I was stunned when I hit 300mhz. Now bearing in mind that this is the default speed of the Ti4600 this is amazing for a card priced around £150 cheaper. I then proceeded to nearly fall off my chair when this little red devil hit 310mhz with full stability. Next up to find the maximum speed of is the ram. Now the Ti4600 default ram speeds is a hefty 650mhz. The Ti4200 default speed is 500mhz, so to hit the Ti4600 speeds I would need to overclock the ram by 150mhz. As with the core my increments were in 10mhz jumps. Unfortunately the ram only managed to get as far as 580mhz saying that though, this is still a overclock of 80mhz so I mustn't grumble. But to be so close to the default Ti4600 speed it is rather irritating. So onto the benchmarking and comparing an overclocked Ti4200 to a Ti4600 at default speeds. Here I will simply use 3DMark2001SE and the Q3Bench benchmarks. 3DMark2001SE
Q3Bench
I personally think this is where the Gainward GeForce 4 - Ti4200 Ultra / 650 TV becomes perhaps the best card on the market. The scores clearly show the card keeping up with the Gainward Ti4600 only dropping a tiny bit due to lower quality Ram chips. Perhaps Gainward would have done better to use higher quality ram here. But using slower ram has definitely kept the price of the card down. Not forgetting here that of course the Ti4200 only has 64mb of ram as apposed to the Ti4600 with a hefty 128mb. I believe the overclock here has been hindered by the hot weather we are experiencing, this would definitely impact the ram chips that have no heat sinks on at all, as well as the core. I would challenge anyone to point me out the difference between a 100% stable overclocked Ti4200 and a Ti4600 at default speeds. |
