Chaintech SE 128MB 8x VIVO
Chaintech may not be a brand that you're overly familiar with, but they're slowly building a reputation for themselves on both the motherboard and video card front by providing modified solutions from the reference design. Let's have a look at their Ti 4200 offering.
You can probably see why Chaintech decided to go with a plastic see-through front here. They obviously want to maximise the appeal of the gold-fronted card. It's very well packaged and oozes a feeling of quality.
The card contrasts colours well with a dark-brown PCB and gold-coloured GPU and RAM sinks. You can see just how shiny they are - the reflection of my camera is clearly visible. The heatsinks are well positioned and difficult to budge. Like most of the other cards, it features 8 x 16MB TSOP RAM modules with 4 on both the front and back. Again, with the RAMsinks covering the RAM completely, it's difficult to gauge the exact rated speed of the modules.
Philips are employed for the VIVO function - this time with the SAA7108E chip being the provider. Although not as good as the SAA7108AE found on some of the cards, it can output to a TV at 800x600. The beauty of this chip is the fact that they take the place of separate encoding / decoding chips. It can also decode incoming signals at the same 800x600 resolution.
The back of the card is only irregular by the provision of the gold RAMsinks.
As the card offers VIVO functionality, an adapter like the one bundled with MSI's Ti 4200 is provided for S-Video In/Out and Composite In/Out. You can see it present in the picture below.
The user manual is well written and a cut above some of the others in this roundup. The software ships inside a DVD box - a nice touch. Speaking of software, Chaintech bundle Aquanox and MDK2 as the gaming titles, WinDVD 4 (5.1 channel), DirectX 8.1, 3Deep colour calibration software, and the 40.52 Detonator drivers. To complement the VIVO functions on offer, NVIDIA's capture drivers are included. We also receive extension cables for both S-Video and RCA connections and the DVI-to-VGA converter. Good.
