Roundup of five Geforce 4 TI 4600s

EVER SINCE we saw the Geforce 4, we knew that it would be the fastest offering on the block. And it was for a good while, as ATI still hadn't released its R300, which transmuted into the 9700 Pro.

Nvidia decided to present these cards in three flavours and clock them differently. The fastest one that everyone wants to own but few can afford is the TI 4600 and we've tested five of them.

These cards are intended to clock at 300 MHz for the graphics processor and 650MHz for the memory but we learned that some companies disobeyed this rule and used even faster core and memory speeds. The slower TI card - the TI 4400 is clocked at 275MHz for the GPU and 550MHz, and the slowest TI 4200 is clocked at 250/500 MHz.

We managed to get Ti 4600 cards that the lovely Nvidia partners decided to share with us and we did an egg-to-egg comparison of this cards and give you our spin of what we think offers the best for the money.

The first card that we got from Grafzilla itself, was a reference one that we tested ages ago and we've just included results of the other cards. The chip used in these cards is codenamed NV25U, running at 300 MHz and it presents the best that Nvidia and TSMC could got from a 63 million transistor chip built on 0.15µ technology. Nvidia used BGA packaging on these cards -- 2.8 nanosecond memory that was able to run as high as 715 MHz but Nvidia decided to clock it at 650 MHz.

One thing that you can not disregard about Geforce 4 TI 4600 cards is that the printed circuit board (PCB) is huge and that the chip is extremely hot but Nvidia implemented nice cooling technology. When we asked Nvidia why it hadn't used .13µ micron process, it simply said that it was not available. Even now at autumn time this process is still not ready.

Geforce 4 is not much of a difference from the original Geforce 3 core and especially the Geforce 3 TI 500. The big news from the Ti 500 generation is the additional vertex shader and now we are talking about two of these. The second big feature is Nview, which gives very nice dual monitor support. This was one of the biggest advantages of the Radeon 8500 and Nvidia was a quick pupil to learn this, spending an additional five million transistors in the process.

We tested on our this common configuration:

An Athlon 2000+ clocked at 1666 MHz
2x128 MB Crucial DDR 266 Ram CL 2.5
Western Digital 40 GB 5400 HDD
Epox 8KHA+ board with KT266A chipset
Toshiba 16X 48X DVD

And the most beauteous NEC Multi Sync 1535 22 inch display capable of running a magnificent 2048x1536 at 75Hz.

We decided to use Windows XP since all other versions of Windows are becoming history. We are beginning to like it.

We used 3dmark 2001 SE as one of the tests that has become a standard The second is good old Quake 3 and its time demo.

The third is Aquamark - a simulation of the Aquanox game that is one of the first real DirectX 8 implementations. We used Return to Castle Wolfenstein demo that is quite old test but still good enough in a way. Of course we used Serious Sam Second Encounter demo that is available for download for quite some time and looks very nice for a DirectX 7 game.

This time we haven't forgotten anisotropic filtering and FSAA performance and we used Quake 3 as a reference app, with different killing effects to improve the look of the game.

Cards
Nvidia reference sample

The Nvidia reference design card is the one sent to the press and its partners to help them to develop their solution for this card. You cannot buy this, but by default this card is sometimes better for picture quality than most of the other cards, simply because Nvidia is not trying to save pennies, while most of its partners do. Most of Nvidia Geforce 4 Ti 4600 cards use this kind of design.

Gainward PowerPack! GeForce4 Ultra/750XP Golden Sample

Gainward is a dynamite company [Fudo just lovesGainward, Ed.] It managed to get many awards and to become significant player in Europe and it will soon conquer the USA as well. Its card is definitely completely different than any other Nvidia card. These guys are not following the Nvidia reference design, and make its own and the cards run faster than any others.

This time they clocked at 311/684 and the card looks startling with a red PCB and very nice heatsinks on the memory as well as fancy cooler on the GPU. It bundles Serious Sam and a Via Firewire cardt. You may get 3D glasses optionally.

You get TV in and OUT cables that makes this card even more attractive as well as video editing software and Power DVD XP software. They are kind enough to bundle DVI to VGA dongle and I need to mention that this is the only card tested that features two DVI ports. You have to pay a few dollars more.

Creative Labs TI 4600

It's well known that the king of retail, Creative Labs does not make its cards. The only real difference between this and the MSI Geforce 4 TI 4600 card is the colour of the cooling fan.

It's clocked at rather unusual 300/660 that makes it a bit faster than other reference designed cards. You get a cable that provides you with TV out and IN. The manual is there with all the right instructions and an installation CD too.

Joytech Bloody Monster II Ti 4600

This is a very interesting card. It looks very attractive and it comes in rather a big box with some usual modest inside. It features S video version of cable that enables your TV IN and OUT and you get an S video cable as well. Joytech also gives you a DVI to VGA dongle and a copy of Win producer. The manual is not the best, but you also get a copy of Win DVD and a driver CD.

Visiontek Xstasy TI 4600

This card is one of the strongest followers of Nvidia's reference design but now it has vanished from the market in much the same way as Elsa, the cards could be hard to find. It has an installation CD, Video IN and OUT cables and a nice manual. God bless technical writers.

The Numbers Game
Here is the benchmarketing that go with these cards.

In this chart you can see that the Gainward card is the fastest simply because it's faster clocked and if I may say so, designed completely differently than the other cards, Visiontek, Creative and the Reference Nvidia cards are almost identical while Joytech is a bit slower. I need to remind you that 50 marks is really a marginal number here - there's not that much difference in performance.

We have a similar situation here where the Gainward card is a bit faster than the other and you can see the benefits of higher memory clock in the Creative card as well. On the nature test Visiontek is a bit faster - something of a surprise - while the Reference card seams to like the vertex shader test. Joytech is almost identical to the Reference and Visiontek cards.

History repeats itself since we have an almost identical score to the previous chart, where Gainward leads and Creative follows and benefits especially at higher resolutions. On the slowest resolution Joytech is the fastest, while it works almost the same as the Visiontek and Reference card.

The Creative card is the pure winner here on 1280 and 1600 resolutions while Gainward is faster on the others. Visiontek and Joytech are faster than Nvidia's reference card.

RTCW performs best on the Ref card and Gainward, while Joytech and Creative had surprisingly slower results than the other cards at 1600 resolutions. I must admit that I was using the very ancient RTCW Atdemo8 and I've decided to drop it in my future testing so don't take these results too seriously.

Gainward is the King of Siam Sam as well, especially at 1600 and 1280 resolutions, while all the other cards perform very similarly since they are based on the same design. Creative is quite slow, considering it clocks memory 10MHz faster.

This proves that there are some differences even with cards based on Nvidia's recommended and reference design.

Gainward comes on out on top while the others are very close, with Visiontek a bit faster than the other competitors. Around 80FSP on all cards at heaviest load with FSAA 4X and 8X anisotropic filtering show the real strength of this card.

Gainward is still the fastest and the others follow with Visiontek one step faster thanthe other three.

On Quincunx, Gainward surprised us with an 11 frames lead over competitors, but you can see that the other cards are very close to each other. On 1600x1200 these cards will give you just a bit more than 30 FPS.

Summa sum arum [Eh? Ed.]
This is an easy one since there is just one card that comes out on top. The Gainward PowerPack! GeForce4 Ultra/750XP Golden Sample is the fastest card of all tested in almost every test while all other cards the other looks very similar by results. Therefore we give Gainward the crown for the fastest Geforce 4 TI 4600 card. It's a few bucks more than the others, but we believe that it's worth it. Creative is a nice performer, mainly because of its faster memory speed while the Visiontek card performed nicely in most of the tests. Joytech is a nice card especially because of its bundle, and it performed similarly to the Ref card.

Joytech still needs to work on its card design, because it's outperformed by other, more experienced, manufacturers.

Choose the card you want based on price, availability and what do you need from bundle that the different firms offer. These, we believe, are the fastest Nvidia cards on the block right now. µ