Overclocking tests
I was also eager to find out if the potential frequency headroom of any given card was more reliant on the cooling employed or more dependant on just how lucky you were in receiving an unexpectedly good core and memory modules. It stands to reason that if all core's yields were equal then cooling and cooling alone would dictate how far they would overclock. If, however, yields varied considerably, all the air cooling in the world wouldn't help much if you received a poor core.
To see just how far the core would go, I used RivaTuner in conjunction with the nature test in 3DMark 2001SE. I raised the core speed from whatever was default in 10MHz increments. My goal was to ascertain the highest frequency at which the card could complete 3 loops of the nature test with perfect image quality. After a lot of trial and error, here's how our cards fared. Please remember that the ABIT OTES ran its core at an inflated 275MHz, whilst the others ran at the default 250MHz.
The first aspect to note is that each and every card is able to run at the Ti4400's default core speed of 275MHz. What becomes apparent, then, is that the potential of the core has more to do with luck in receiving a decent one than in the cooling employed. The biggest disappointment here has to be the ABIT OTES card. Running at 275MHz stock and employing the loudest and most impressive-looking cooling of any card, it starts to falter below the 300MHz level. We may have received a poor sample but that's how it fared. The MSI card, with its mountain of copper, didn't do too well, either.
The 335MHz core of the Creative was the most surprising here - Creative must have received a fantastic shipment of Ti 4200 cores from TSMC. We still cannot infer that all Creatives will be equally good, it's just that this one had an exceptional core. Every card that managed to be stable above 300MHz core has to be commended. The Gainwards did well, too.
Memory potential, on the other hand, should be a little easier to predict. I expected the 2 cards featuring BGA RAM (Gainward 750 and Albatron Turbo) to top the charts here. Again, the same testing methodology was used. 3 passes of the nature test without a sparkle.
The only card with bare RAM to exceed 600MHz was the Creative. This probably has more to do with the fact that it features 3.6ns RAM - some others have 4ns RAM. The ABIT OTES fails to impress once again. Quite unsurprisingly, the Albatron Turbo and Gainward 750, both featuring Tiny BGA RAM rated at a nominal 606MHz, take a decisive lead in the memory stakes here. This begs the question as to why Gainward didn't choose to set a factory default memory clock of greater than 513MHz. The Albatron Turbo, however, ran at a default 553MHz - as did the ABIT OTES.
So, in summary, the Creative card performed far better than expected in both the core and memory stakes. The Gainward cards, Leadtek, and X-Micro cards did well generally, but the MSI and ABIT cards were a bit below what I expected. Still, these were samples of one and you shouldn't infer that all cards by a manufacturer will overclock in the same fashion.
