Albatron GeForce4 Ti4200 Video Card Review

by Patrick aka. acid-phreak

Date: November 3, 2002

Proper thanks

Before I start into the article, I want to take a second and thank Albatron for sending us over this card for review here at AMDPower.

Introduction

If you have checked out my review of Albatron's GeForce4 MX440 video card then you already know a little about Albatron as a company. For those who are not so familiar with the name Albatron, I'll give you a very quick recap. Albatron came quick into the market around March 2002 with motherboards supporting both the Intel and AMD processors. Quickly following these releases were video cards powered by NVIDIA's famous GPU. Before this they producing products under the name Monivision. If want more details on what Monivision (now Albatron) produces check out their website.

Now Albatron has been kind enough to provide us a sample of their Ti4200P Turbo Series video card. As one might know, the Ti4200 is the little brother to the Ti44 and Ti4600 series video cards. But this little brother is a little different then most Ti4200 video cards and the below chart will show you why.

The above chart should start to reveal what Albatron has done. They have taken the Ti4200 series card and manufactured it on a 8 layer PCB (much like what the Ti400 and Ti4600's are printed on) and added 3.3ns BGA DDR RAM to increase the memory clock speeds, and added 128MB of RAM. The card comes clocked at a default memory clock speed of 550MHz but I suspect we are going to be able to push that way beyond 600MHz.

Card Highlights

• Accuview Antialiasing™
• Lightspeed Memory Architecture™ II
• 4 dual-rendering pipelines
• 8 texels per clock cycle
• AGP 4X/2X Support (Newer models incorporate 8x support)
• Nvidia Unified Driver Architecture (UDA)
• High-quality HDTV/DVD playback
• Microsoft® DirectX® 8.X and OpenGL® 1.3 Optimizations and Support

A Closer look: Albatron GeForce4 Ti4200P Turbo

Being that Albatron has not been at this long, they are still trying different things with their packaging. With the MX440 card I reviewed, they had the flashy box but no name for their card other then MX440. With this Ti4xx series of cards, they chose to call them "medusa" depicting a woman with snakes jetting out of her head and an inviting hand wave drawing you in.

First glance at the front of the box quickly shows you that the card inside is sporting 128MB of DDR RAM, DVI, and TV Out. The back gives a quick overview of the cards specifications, points out that it comes with WinDVD and two full retail games, and that is has a 3-year warranty. Not as bold as others who offer life time warranties but to be honest who keep the same vid card for three years?

The 8-layered PCB is about 9 inches in length which should fit into most system boards with out any problems. One thing to look out for is that with the longer cards comes the possibility that the card may butt up against the memory sockets on your system board. On the Gigabyte GA-7VRXP it fit just fine with out any clearance issues.

I like the cooling solution Albatron choose to use on this card. An oversized copper heatsink (good heat dissipation) with the traditional fan to push some air across the heatsink fins. One other thing to note is that the ram sinks on the front of the card butt right up against the copper fins of the heatsink. I suspect the hope is that the air being push across the heatsink would also blow across the ram sinks providing some extra cooling. Of course mounted below the cooler is NVIDIA's Ti4200 GeForce4 core.

To help increase the capability of this card, Albatron decided to stick some ram sinks on over the video ram to help increase performance by keeping the ram cool. If you plan on running this card above the default memory clock speeds then these become a more important addition. Of course I ripped off these sinks to see exactly what lie behind them. In the above picture you can see that Albatron loaded this card with Samsung memory chips. I checked Samsungs website to see what these memory chips were. 128Mbit, 300MHz Max Clock, 3.3ns, BGA DDR SDRAM. Just as expected.

And like most Ti series cards, this card comes equipped with a VGA port, S-Video port, and DVI port. Take your pick.

This time around, Albatron included a 5' S-Video cable which makes hooking this card up to your TV easy. And for those who don't have a S-Video port on their TV, Albatron included a S-Video to RCA converter with a 6' RCA cable. One thing missing that I would have liked to see included is a DVI to VGA adapter. Although not necessary for operation, if you want to hookup two VGA monitors to this card you will have to buy an adapter. I just happened to have one lying around...

Test Setup Details -->