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Ti4200-8X Overclocking

With the likes of the OTES and TOPTech cooling system to bolster our efforts, we tried our hand at overclocking the cards and pushing them to their limits.

Somewhat to our disappointment, and surprise, the Abit Siluro card proved to be less than stellar an overclocker. We only achieved a core speed of 291Mhz and memory speed of 583Mhz. Pushing the clock further resulted in lockups, and higher memory speeds gave us screen corruptions during benchmarks. Our results are likely below par though, since Tech-Report reliably overclocked their OTES card to 315/585 core/memory clock speeds.

The AOpen card we managed to push to 300/587 core/memory, which was a pleasant surprise considering its barebones style cooling. In effect, the OTES system was a flashy cooling solution, but the actual headroom on the AOpen card proved to provide a more lucrative overclock, in spite of its more down to earth cooling.

The MSI Ti4200-VTD8X, which had proven the slowest in benchmarks at stock speeds, redeemed itself when we overclocked it stably to 298/620 core/memory. Whether or not you believe in TOPTech cooling's effectiveness, at the very least this is our second MSI card with TOPTech to be able to reach such satisfying overclocked numbers. Certainly MSI and TOPTech cooling were able to do more than the louder, more cumbersome OTES system in this particular comparison.

Conclusion

The Ti4200-8X cards we saw today showed that AGP8X, while not a significant performance booster, did have its place in the current market. With some benchmarks showing a measurable performance increase over older 4200 cards, and healthy overclocking headroom in all three cards, the new breed of 4200-8X cards are a worthy choice for anyone upgrading from a pre-GeForce 4 card. Again, owners of originial GF4 Ti4200 and Ti4600 are not advised to upgrade, since they will see little improvement over their existing cards. For those who do own non-AGP8X cards that perform at or near the level of the GF4, it's better to wait until later to upgrade, when the GF4 family of cards has itself become obsolete.

In this particular round up of cards, I was the most impressed with Abit's push for innovation with OTES, but I can't say I endorse the idea of the added expense and noise given that the cooling capabilities of the system proved no better than the much queieter, and less intrusive TOPTech cooling that MSI's engineers came up with. I can say though, that OTES has potential, and that with time it could mature into a very appealing technology indeed.

Top honours should be given to the MSI and the AOpen cards, the latter of which was a refreshing performer with great overclocking capability and a modest cooling setup. I was actually quite happy to see how high the core could be overclocked on the Aeolus even without fancied up cooling.

Lowest Prices for GF4 Ti4200 8X Cards