Asus 128MB 8x VIVO
Asustek, or Asus as they're more commonly known, have been producing NVIDIA-based video cards for some time now. Bringing their quality ethos over from motherboard manufacturing, Asus cards often arrive at a slight premium when compared to a number of competing manufacturers. With features such as gold contacts, comprehensive bundles, and 3-year guarantees, the premium is often worth it. Let's have a look at Asus' Ti 4200.
Our review Asus arrived in non-retail form. This isn't how you'd receive your card as Asus don't generally believe in bare cards, it's just that we required the card at very short notice.
The card is typically Asus. They've toyed with a maroon PCB but seem most happy with the generic light-brown PCB above. It seems as if all the manufacturers have their own idea of how to cool the Ti 4200 GPU. Asus use an ORB-like cooler with plasticky fins for maximum heat dispersal. The cooler is affixed rigidly - there's no give in it at all. Asus, unlike most of the others on test here, leave the RAM bare without any extra cooling provisions.
A close-up shot reveals that Samsung modules are employed in a 8 x 16MB formation. It's difficult to ascertain the rated speed of these modules, but it appears to be 4ns (or 500MHz DDR). We'll see what affect the lack of RAMsinks has on overclocking a little later on.
Asus choose to continue the Philips VIVO theme with the SAA7108AE encoder / decoder chip sitting to the left of the GPU. As I've mentioned before, it has the ability to output video signals of up to 1280x1024, making it impressive on the specification front. As always, if you want to use the video-in feature for capturing, you need to install the supplied NVIDIA WDM drivers.
As you would expect here. I shan't discuss the bundle for the simple reason that our card arrived bare. Asus are usually pretty good on the software front. With their impressive buying power, most Asus cards ship with a plethora of extras.
