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Now we've covered nForce 415 based hardware at Hexus before and also the Ti4200 has seen a large amount of coverage here too (I think I've looked at nearly 10 NV25 cards so far for Hexus) but to my knowledge they've never seen coverage in tandem and pairing up products like this is something you all do on a daily basis when figuring out a new system or upgrade.
So it's worth covering both briefly just to see what we get.
First up, the Ti4200. This will all be familiar to most but bear with me.
• NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4200 GPU
• nfiniteFX™ II Engine for programmability
• Accuview Antialiasing™
• nViewTM Display Technology
• Lightspeed Memory Architecture™ II
• 4 Billion AA samples per second fill rate
• 86 Million triangles/sec
• 1.03 trillion operations/sec
• Default Clock speed 250/250(Core/Memory)
• 64MB world's fastest DDR Memory
• 8 GB/sec Memory Bandwidth
• Microsoft® DirectX® 8.X and OpenGL® 1.3 Optimizations and Support
• 4 dual-rending pilelines
• 8 texels per clock cycle
• Dual cube environment mapping
• High-Definition Video Processor(HDTV)
• AGP 4X/2X and AGP Texturing Support
• On-board TV-out support up to 1024x768 resolution
• On-board DVI support up to 1280x1024 resolution
• High-quality HDTV/DVD playback
Full DirectX 8.x compatibility (unlike the bastardisation of DX8 compatibility you get from NV17/GF4MX) from the NV25 GPU and all the good stuff like nView, 1024x768 TV-Out support, DVI and a 64MB framebuffer. Also being a Leadtek, you get their cooling system that makes the card heavier than my Lian Li case and does a sterling job.
And the platform they provide for that card.
• NVIDIA nForce 415D Chipset
• Socket A for AMD Athlon/Duron
• CPU Bus Frequency ranges : 200 to 266MHz (DDR)
• Support 3x 184 -pin DIMM slot for DDR-SDRAM module up to 1.5GB of memory
• 1 x 32bit 4X AGP slot, 4 x 32bit PCI slot, 1 x CNR slot.
• Two Ultra ATA 33/66/100 IDE ports
• PS/2 Mini-Din mouse & keyboard ports
• Two USB Ports
• One 25pin D-SUB female printer port
• One 9pin D-SUB male serial port for COM1
• Game/Midi port, Line In, Line Out and Mic In jacks
• RJ45 connector for Ethernet
So we have the original nForce platform (hey, it's still an excellent chipset and you can actually buy it!) with all the goodies like the DASP hardware, the lovely lovely APU audio hardware, support for DDR SDRAM (two channels too) and decent expansion from 4 PCI. With the v1.0 APU on audio duty that's as good as any add in card that doesn't cost the earth and change, 4 PCI slots is forgivable.
So to sum up, here's the interesting parts of what you get to get you excited.
• Full, fast, DirectX 8.x compatibility with goodies (anti aliasing, anisotropic texture filtering)
• Excellent (class leading) audio hardware
• 1024x768 on the TV-Out
• Support for all AMD's current processors
• Dual monitor support
As you know, nForce is a stable platform for any AMD endeavours and the audio hardware is top notch. Combined with a nice DX8 accelerator and you have a nice base package to build a system around. Either budget oriented with something like the XP1600+ or something a little more high end with something like XP2200+ and some overclock on the Ti4200 (encouraged, that cooling hardware strapped to it isn't there for show).
So what's the bundle like to live with? Keep reading.
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