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Ti4200-8X: MSI, AOpen, and Abit

Lowest Prices for GF4 Ti4200 8X Cards

With the recent news that Nvidia will sell only limited numbers of the GeForce FX upon launch, it seems as though Nvidia's decision to relaunch their entire GeForce4 line with AGP8X support will end up being a longer term strategy than many of us had anticipated. With our recent coverage of 440MX-8X cards and our review of MSI's Ti4600-8X, it was quite evident that the success of the AGP8X compatible Nvidia cards will depend more on marketing and the value added by individual manufacturers than on the actual merit of adding 8X support to a family of cards that's begining to look old. Today we complete our coverage of these cards with this small sample of cards from some of the industry's big names: MSI, AOpen, and Abit.

But first, why bother with the 4200-8X to begin with? The 440MX-8X cards did get some kudos due to Nvidia's new, higher clock speed specs for both the core and the RAM compared to the original 440MX parts. MSI showed ingenuity with their T.O.P.Tech cooling system on the 4600-8X card. And now, we look at the middle ground: the GF4 Ti4200-8X. This particular line of cards is interesting because as always people want to get the best performance bang for the buck, while trying to keep the actual number of those bucks spent to the barest minimum. While the Ti4200 isn't exactly a budget card like a Xabre400 or 440MX card, it finds itself in the middle between budget, and high end performance - and price. Better, previous 4200 cards could be overclocked to stock 4600 performance levels, and two of the three new generation cards we're testing today have specialized cooling systems that might make overclocking an even more rewarding experience.

The Contenders

Rather than starting with a list of rehashed "specs" and features that have been published for 4200 cards all of 2002, lets take a look at the contenders in today's 4200-8X gathering:

MSI GF4 Ti4200-VTD8X 128MB

AOpen Aeolus Ti4200S 8X 128MB

Abit Siluro GeForce4 Ti 4200-8X OTES 128MB

Of the cards tested, your attention will most likely be riveted on the MSI and Abit cards, both of which feature some pretty funky cooling solutions. MSI's TOPTech cooling system you've already seen in our 4600-8X article, and we were gratified to find that MSI didn't downgrade their cooling for the lower end card. The beautiful monstrosity sitting atop the Siluro 4200 card is Abit's latest pride and joy. The OTES acronym stands for Outside Thermal Exhaust System and you can see that herein lies the precusor, if not the inspiration, for the GeForce FX's cooler.

Ti4200-8X Overview

The whole point of the AGP8X release of Nvidia's GF4 lineup is to add support for the new graphics interface that has double the bandwidth of the previous AGP4X interface. If you've been following our articles or articles on other sites you will no doubt know that while the bandwidth is increased to a very nice 2.1Gb/s, the actual boost in performance is hardly worth the effort of upgrading from a regular GF4 card to its AGP8X-enabled equivalent. With clock speeds set equally, the 8X cards really only bring another few percent performance to the tab, when and if they manage to outperform their AGP4X cousins at all. With that said, the Ti4200-8X cards today do bring several things to the table. Firstly, with technological advances in general for RAM and core yields, these cards theoretically have better headroom for overclocking. Secondly, companies have introduced new cooling systems like the OTES and TOPTech systems seen here, which will both cool your cards better, and allow better cooling with these newer "stock" coolers.

Now the important thing to remember is that the Ti4200 and Ti4200-8X have the exact same specs in terms of fillrate, memory bandwidth, and operations/vertices performed per second. This means that the real only tech spec that has changed is the AGP8X support, and that feature alone is not worth an upgrade from a non-8X capable Ti4200.