Card II
The back is also an interesting affair. Firstly with the massive heatsink.
The copper's shiny, hence my partial reflection. Simply push the two pins that you see above through and the back comes off rather too easily. It's not applied that well either, as you can move it about with minimal force. Anyway, off it comes.
Tiny BGA RAM is standard for all Ti 4400 / 4600 cards, so it's of little surprise to see it here. MSI have had the care and attention to add a little thermal paste on the RAM modules and the back of the GPU. An identical impression was to be found on the back of the RAMsink, showing us that contact was made.
Cleaning some of the paste off reveals Samsung RAM rated at 3.6ns (555MHz), spot-on for the 550MHz DDR memory clock-speed. I was hoping for some 3.3ns BGA RAM as found on the Albatron GeForce4 Ti 4200 Turbo card.
Software is where MSI usually come into their own.
The software and hardware bundle is found on all of MSI's deluxe cards. 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. MSI also include their in-house tweaking utility should you wish to push the card further. 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.
2D was pretty good at 1280x1024x32 on a Samsung 181T TFT display. If you hadn't seen a Radeon in action, you'd be pleased with the Ti 4800-SE's 2D ability in both VGA and DVI modes. The Radeons are a little bit better, though.
