Ti 4200 already launched - Bloody Evil

Our Chinese friends point out that a company named Joytech already has information on its web site about these upcoming cards, with clock speeds of 250 MHz for the core and 240 for the memory.

Bloody Evil is the marketing name of the card and we got a feeling that this Taiwanese company didn't have it in mind that the name could be considered as somewhat rude in some places on the planet.

According to the info we had before, the reference 4200 card should work on a synchronic 250/250 clock but we learned that at least Joytech will not follow this design.

This leads me to think of ATI's fuzzy clocking details where many manufacturers introduce their cards on different memory clocks, such as 250/240 and other variants while ATI recommends 250/250 for its 8500LE.

The Ti 4200 that we received works on 250/245 MHz clock and uses Samsung memory - with normal packaging and not BGA (ball grid array) and has a 4.0ns access time that is just enough to achieve 500 MHz memory clock.

The card looks similar to Geforce 4 MX cards that we saw and it's significantly smaller than the TI 4600/4400 cards.

This card is meant to compete with the ATI Radeon 8500LE with 128 MB that is also available from Joytech. Joytech is one of the companies that produces both ATI and Nvidia cards since this is what "customers ask from these companies" and you must have some profit at the end of the day.

Nvidia recommends a $199 price tag for these cards with 128MB of memory, while we learned that we may be able to see a 64MB version as well that should be $20 cheaper.

Fair fight or not, we have yet to see but if you bought a Geforce 4 MX460 you may regret that, since just a $20-$40 more expensive card with complete DX 8 support is about to hit the market with the 4200 prefix.

We think this card will bring Nvidia some good profits and it will be as popular as the GF4 MX 420 DDR is in the mainstream segment.

We're about to discover which is faster - the Nvidia TI 4200 or the ATI Radeon 8500 LE with 128MB of memory.

128MB of memory is not reserved for high end market and you can find it in the mainstream these days. That's progress, we suppose, and we'll see 256MB, 512MB and 1024MB cards in the future. µ