MSI Ti4200-8X VIVO
MSI's card usually ship with a myriad of extras. We've previously seen MSI's Ti 4xxx cards arrive with a multitude of CDs, connectors, and brackets. Let's see if the latest Ti 4200 is any different.
The box is larger than all but a couple of other Ti 4200s on test. Indicative of what we might find inside, it's pleasingly illustrated and reassuringly heavy. The 8x AGP support is emblazoned on the front cover to leave you in no doubt.
The first aspect to note is the physical size of the card - it's slightly larger and heavier than a standard Ti 4200. This is thanks to the copious amounts of copper used in the heatsink. As you can see it covers the GPU and RAM with ease. Although it's primarily held on by two pushpins, the rest of the heavy heatsink is simply glued on. I found it disarmingly easy to pull the cooling away from the RAM modules. I'd liked to have it epoxied on. This is especially true if the card is integrated in systems from various builders who ship pre-built systems. I wouldn't like to see the performance of this card compromised from a poor contact from heatsink to GPU/memory.
Hiding behind a block of copper is the new Philips SAA7108AE VIVO single chip providing output resolutions, in either PAL or NTSC, of up to 1280x1024. It also has the ability to encode to HDTVs. The general layout of the card is good considering the size of the heatsink employed. I found no trouble in installing it in a number of motherboards.
The back continues the copper-clad theme. Once again it was too easy to simply pull the heatsink away from the RAM that it's intended to cool.
The back is standard fare nowadays with the HD15, Video, and DVI connections present. The versatility of the Philips SAA7108AE chip is fully maximised with a separate, but included, breakout box. It offers S-Video In/Out and composite video In/Out.
The software bundle is as impressive as any of the cards on test. You receive a whopping 10 CDs along with the breakout box and a S-Video extension lead. Thankfully, MSI have also bundled in a DVI-to-VGA converter if you wish to use dual CRT displays. The software bundle includes a number of MSI's in-house utilities, WinDVD (albeit an older version), Intervideo's WinProducer / WinCoder for conversion between various captured formats, Virtual Drive, the excellent Morrowind, Duke Nukem and Ghost Recon games. A further CD finishes it off with demos of various games. The accompanying manual seems to cover all of MSI's cards with the first 50 pages devoted to the various cards in their extensive range.
In operation the MSI Ti 4200 8x was a little quieter than expected. Looking at the rather extravagant cooling on offer, I was assuming the worst. The noise emitted by the card was no worse than a standard Ti 4200. 2D quality was subjectively good at all resolutions up to 1600x1200x32. TV-Out seemed fairly crisp when outputted via S-Video to a pure flat 28" Panasonic TV.
