Card I
MSI have never been a company afraid of making an impression with their presentation. Most of the pertinent features are listed on the box cover. The 8x AGP support, 128MB DDR memory, VTD (Video-In / TV-Out, DVI), and a mammoth 10 discs holding 17 utilities.
Looking at the card itself now.
We first saw this all-encompassing cooler make its appearance on MSI's Ti 4200 8x card in our 12-card roundup recently. MSI obviously believe in sticking to what appears to work for them. The gigantic copper-clad cooler cools both the GPU and memory at the same time.
The heatsink is a reasonable fit for the GPU and memory. The problem that I have with it, and I had with the Ti 4200 version, is it's all to easy to pull the heatsink away from the parts that it's meant to be cooling. It's only attached on by the pushpins you see a the top. I would have liked to seen some epoxy or even fragtape being used. To its credit, the fan is reasonably quiet for such an overwhelming cooler.
Heat is channeled from the GPU to the rear via the fins you see above. It all seems to work well enough in practice. Just below the fins sits the Philips SAA7108AE encoder/decoder. It has the ability for TV-Out and Video-In. Max resolution is 1280x1024 on both counts. Having used it on the Ti 4200 roundup, it's the best of the Philips' offerings. TV-Out is relatively sharp and the Video-In is a doddle to use. More on that later.
The usual HD15, Video Out, and DVI connections on the back.
