Gainward GF4 Ultra/750-8X XP Review - PAGE 1

When we finished off our Ti4600-8X review, we had said that we were done with the AGP8X capable family of GeForce4 cards. In fact, at the time we had only looked at AGP8X versions of the 440MX, Ti4200, and Ti4600 cards, with no intention to go any further. Thank goodness Gainward sent us their Ultra/750-8X XP card, or else we would never have bothered to look at a Ti4800SE card, which would be a shame - because it turns out that the Gainward Ultra/750-8X card offers a more than decent balance of performance and price.

Nvidia Name Game

As I had explained in our MSI GF4 Ti4600-VT2D8X review, Nvidia has named their AGP8X capable Ti4400 chip as the Ti4800SE. This can be confusing because the Ti4800 (without the trailing SE) is the European name of the Ti4600-8X card. The below chart will give you an idea of the clock speed differences between the new generation of GF4 Ti cards:

Note however, that Gainward overclocks their card right out of the box, not unlike what Abit's been doing with their Ti4200 card. Gainward's card default is 275/550 just like a regular Ti4800SE, but their drivers will set the card to 288/615Mhz.

Gainward's Ti4800SE card:

The Gainward Ultra 750-8X card's appearance is somewhere in-between a barebones look-alike and a more customized card. Gainward uses what they call a "unique" red cooling fan, but the design is very similar to AOpen's GPU cooling fans, and we have seen its like before on other cards. While the fan doesn't appear overly impressive, we have found that it does as well a job as more elaborate coolers when it comes to overclocking, so don't let its banal looks fool you.

More interestingly, Gainward includes quaint red coloured RAM coolers on all of the memory chips - yes even those on the back of the card. Whether RAM heatsinks actually have any positive effect on overclocking success is still in debate amongst reviewers and enthusiasts, with both sides of the argument having obtained data to support their claims. We ourselves find that RAM coolers can make a difference, and if a company includes coolers on all their memory chips, it saves you the trouble of having to do it yourself later. At the very least you get a certain peace of mind.

Underneath the memory coolers are either Hynix 3.5ns or Samsung 3.3ns memory. You might want to take off your RAM coolers to see which, since other cards that use Samsung 3.3ns sometimes have better overclocking headroom.