Techaddicts.net-MSI TD-64 64mb GeForce 4 Ti 4200 Video Card Review

Review by: Daniel

Date: 7/24/02

MSI has been producing great video cards lately and one of them is the MSI GeForce 4 Ti 4200. The specific video card I am reviewing is the 64 MB version. Two things that are interesting about this card is that it features a Red PCB (board) and has the fan/heatsink combo that is used on MSI's GeForce 4 Ti 4600.

I bought this video card off of FTIcomputers.com for $150 including shipping, which is pretty cheap for a card that gets higher 3DMarks and overall performance than the ATI Radeon 8500 and LE versions.

The box comes with a Manual, Driver Disks, DVI to VGA adapter, S-Video cables, and 7 Games including No One Lives Forever and Aquanox. It also comes with the demo of Comanche 4. The drivers on this disc are not too optimized for gaming. They will be okay if you cannot download the newest nVIDIA Detonator XP.

This Video Card features the GeForce 4 Ti 4200 GPU along with 64 MB of DDR Ram that is overclockable to 620 MHz when I tried it. The brand of the ram is Hynix. Hynix is a pretty good brand and the chip that the produce usually overclock well. This is certainly good, since the default is 520 MHz. The default core speed is 250 MHz and can reach 300 MHz without a problem.

Chipset Features from http://www.msi.com.tw
◊ The nVIDIA nfiniteFX™ II Engine enables a
virtually infinite number of special effects that
   deliver the next leap in realism to 3D graphics
◊ Dual programmable Vertex Shaders
◊ Advanced programmable Pixel Shaders
◊ nVIDIA Lightspeed Memory Architecture™ II
◊ nVIDIA Accuview™ Antialiasing
◊ 3D Textures
◊ Shadow Buffers
◊ 4 dual-rendering pipelines
◊ 8 texels per clock cycle
◊ Dual cube environment mapping
◊ 64MB high-speed DDR RAM memory
◊ High-Definition Video Processor (HDVP)
◊ AGP 4X with Fast Writes
◊ AGP 4X / 2X and AGP Texturing support
◊ 32-bit color with 32-bit Z/stencil buffer
◊ Z-correct true, reflective bump mapping
◊ High-performance 2D rendering engine
◊ Hardware accelerated real-time shadows
◊ True-color hardware cursor
◊ Integrated hardware transform engine
◊ Integrated hardware lighting engine
◊ High-quality HDTV/DVD playback
◊ TV-Out and Video Modules
◊ Multibuffering (double, triple, quad) for
   smooth animation and video playback
◊ Microsoft DirectX® and S3TC® texture
   compression
◊ nVIDIA Unified Driver Architecture (UDA)
◊ Up to 10.4 GB/sec. memory bandwidth
◊ 136 million triangles/sec. setup engine
◊ 4.8 billion AA sample/sec. fill rate
◊ 1.23 trillion operations/sec.

Some of these specifications may be confusing to the average computer user, but most represent a great improvement for the Geforce 4.

You can see that the results are amazing for a video card that costs $150. These results are very close to the GeForce 4 Ti 4600 at half the price. I was amazed that it actually reached 10103 3DMarks! when overclocked.

With all the video cards coming out, this is the best Video Card with its performance and price. If you want even more performance and a hefty price tag, I recommend buying a MSI GeForce 4 Ti 4600 with 128 mb of DDR ram.

Overall this card deserves a 8 out of 10 rating for its value and performance.