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Abit Siluro GeForce4 Ti 4200-8X OTES 128MB

By far the most striking of the three cards, and indeed, of ANY card we have seen in the past year, is the Abit Siluro GF4 Ti4200-8X OTES card, and in no small part thanks to just how amazingly beautiful this card looks. This card LOOKS every bit as hardcore as it's convoluted name sounds, and it carries this look with a style that even wows people who are otherwise indifferent to geek toys (like my girlfriend, who, having seen the card, shocked me by showing some curiosity in its unique design).

All the arguments that make a mockery of the Nvidia GeForce FX card come to the fore when you look at this card: the OTES system takes up 2 expansion slots on your case, and it looks like it might make as much noise as a GFFX. The latter proved to be untrue, though the OTES system does expell air through the rear of your case, and in doing so adds extra noise to your rig that TOPTech cooling would not. But check this out: the card comes out of the box overclocked. That's right, Abit takes a more proactive path with this card and nudges the clockspeeds up above the default, right out of the box:

Abit uses Hynix 275Mhz DDR memory in their boards, which means that while they overclock their Ti4200 GPU, the RAM is not really overclocked, and this means that there's more headroom left in the RAM that Abit hasn't tapped into yet. One side-effect of overclocking the GPU and having a higher memory speed is that it propels the Abit card ahead of all the other Ti4200 cards in our benchmarks, but since no 4200 card we've come across has failed to overclock to at least the same levels as the Abit Siluro's stock overclocked speeds, we don't think the Abit shows a significant consumer advantage, except when the comparative benchmarks are analysed without taking Abit's little overclock into consideration.

A closer look at OTES

While the MSI TopTech system partially isolates the cooling system from its surrounding environments to better control airflow, the OTES system completely encloses the process within its system. Air is pulled in by the impeller, and then shunted through the plastic enclosure, past the corridor of the copper fins, and finally out the rear exhaust of the card. The whole assembly consists of the fan, plastic enclosure, copper base and fins, and a heatpipe. The fan, by the way, churns at a surprising 7200RPM. This produces a lot more noise than other coolers, though curiously the mechanical noise of the bearings seemed noisier than the turbulence and noise of air movement. This may give Abit some room for improvement, since it seems as though the whole system could be made more quiet through use of a different fan, while keeping the rest of the OTES theory and design intact.

The OTES cooling system, unlike the TOPTech system, does not include any sort of cooling for the memory chips. Some reviewers will likely harp about this oversight, but some people believe that memory cooling has little to no effect on memory overclocking, while others have found significant improvements with memory cooling.