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For a start, the key base spec, judiciously taken from Visiontek's own site.
• Controller: NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4200
• Bus Type AGP
• Memory 128MB DDR
• Core Clock 250MHz
• Memory Clock 444MHz memory
• RAMDAC 350MHz RAMDAC
• API Support Direct-X®, Open GL ICD® for Windows
• Connectors VGA, DVI, TV-Out
• 4.0 Billion texel fill rate
• 113 Million vertices/sec setup
• 7.1 GB/second memory bandwidth
Standard stuff here with the memory clock being the standout item. NVIDIA's official spec on the Ti4200 shows 8GB/sec of memory bandwidth available to the NV25 GPU but in 128MB configurations, like you see here, the memory is clocked lower, offering 0.9GB/sec less than the stated spec at 7.1GB/sec.
Apart from that, everything is intact including NVIDIA's excellent nView capabilities both at GPU level on the TMDS and also in terms of physical outputs since the board is fully equipped with DVI-I output for digital display panels or a second analogue display when used with a convertor, D-Sub connector for analogue displays like you are used to seeing and a regular TV-Out port driven by the Connexant CX25871 processor. I'm a fan of the Connexant output and it drives my TV excellently with especially good video quality when watching DVD's via the PC.
No VIVO functions as provided by the rarer Philips processor on some boards but at this price point, not a surprising ommision.
NVIDIA's excellent driver support is there with the Detonator series of drivers. 2D wise, Visiontek seem to use a nice set of filters to the analogue output (DVI output untested) with the 2D display nice and crisp and focussed at all my test resolutions (up to 1600x1200, 85Hz).
So a stock 128MB Ti4200 board on the smaller PCB using a Blue Orb style cooler in lovely anodised purple and no cooling at all for the memory modules.
A quick recap on NV25's features with the GPU having 4 dual texel render pipes and so it can do 8 texel ops per clock cycle with the pipes fully utilised. All of the above adds up to our board of choice at the moment. We're big fans of the Ti4200 here at Hexus due to the price/performance ratio and the fact the NV25 GPU remains intact, even at this price point. Competitive with the Radeon 8500 for our recommendation, the Ti4200 gets the nod for the money.
So how does the board perform? Lets pit it against Ti4400 on our P4 based test bed and see what kind of conclusions we can draw.
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