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| Gainward GeForce4 Ti4200-8X Video Card |
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| Written by Alexandru Spataru | |
| Wednesday, 20 June 2007 | |
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The Gainward PCB has 8 layers, compared to only 6 layers that other Ti4200 cards have, which increases the signal strength and clarity over the entire board. Besides more PCB layers, the Gainward design also has a different power supply that provides more stable voltages to the GPU and memory. Although a bit larger than the reference design, the Gainward PCB should do a better job. When I first got my hands on the Ultra/750-8X XP GS video card, I quickly installed it in my test computer and started overclocking right away.
My first goal was to reach 300MHz for core, equivalent to the GeForce4 Ti4600, and 600MHz for memory. Since the memory is rated 3.3ns, 600MHz is the maximum rated speed. At 300/600, the card worked without any problems, so I, being a very impatient overclocker, increased the memory clock to 650MHz. Again, no problems or visual artifacts at 300/650 MHz core/RAM which is the stock speed for the GeForce4 Ti4600 and GeForce4 Ti4800. As if getting a GF4 Ti4200 to work at Ti4600/4800 speeds is wasn't enough, I increased the memory speed even further to 700MHz. No glitches what-so-ever, no crashes, no artifacts. So I started playing with the core clock, getting it first to 310MHz, which was perfectly OK, as expected, then to 315MHz, OK again, then to 320MHz. Running 3DMark 2001SE or any other game at 320/700 presented no problem to the card, which is simply amazing. In my search for the maximum speeds, I increased the core clock to 325MHz and the memory clock to 710MHz!!! Everything went just fine, but the core got pretty hot, so, even though the card was still running 3DMark without any problems, I decided to calm down and settle for 320MHz as the optimal speed for the GPU. Still, I was able to run 3DMark at 330MHz for GPU with the room window open (outside temperature was about -10C), but the performance increase was not worth it, plus, I was freezing. Now for the memory, it seems like 715MHz was too much, because a few artifacts started appearing after half an hour of running 3DMark continuously, so I settled for 710MHz. In the end, I was quite happy with 320/710 MHz GPU/RAM:
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| Last Updated ( Sunday, 01 July 2007 ) |
