Written By:
Date Posted: June 17, 2002

So the GeForce 4 cards are well into the mainstream now and manufacturers have been turning out there cards for us to long for and drool over. Some companies wanted to be among the first and released there cards very early in the game. A few companies sat back and waited a while. Gainward is one such company who waited and with good reason. Gainward started life as just one man back in 1984 in Taiwan, and has grown to offer us some really good products worldwide. There "Golden Sample" cards impressed quite a few last time round and they wanted to wait for the right chip yields so they could offer us the same again. Lucky me, the guys at are stocking these cards so I just had to know if there current top end card would live up to my expectations.

The Gainward GeForce 4 Powerpack! Ultra/750XP "Golden Sample" (could you add any more abbreviations and hints to a name?) is a Ti4600 card based on the Nvdia reference design, although as you will see later, there are a few additions. It isn't an Ultra version of the Ti4600, but it will run faster than a standard card out of the box. It will also run on other systems besides XP, despite the name :p. Before I go into the package, pictures and benchmarks let's take a look at the product specifications I stole from Gainwards website.

Specs

Integrated nVIDIA GeForce4 Ti series the most powerful GPU.
Supporting 128MB high-speed 128bit DDR RAM/SDRAM memory.
nVIDIA nVIEW TM Display Technology provides flexibility and control for using multiple displays.
Lightspeed Memory TM Architecture (LMA) II increases memory bandwidth efficiency for unmatched performance.
Accuview TM Antialiasing delivers unbeatable visual quality and frames rates.
NVIDIA nfiniteFX TMII engine for full programmability.
Dual Programmable Pixel product surface details never before seen on the desktop
Integrated hardware transform and lighting engine.
Integrated 32-bit color and 32-bit Z/Stencil Buffer.
Integrated Cube environment mapping, and true reflective bump mapping.
Multibuffering (double, triple, quadruple) for smooth animation and video playback.
AGP 2X/4X supporting and Execute Mode, Easy Plug- and-Play AUTORUN installation From CD-ROM include.
Support High-Definition Video Processor (HDVP).
Gainward's ExperTool TM utility for customized performance enhancements and efficient desktop management. Performance enhanced, accelerated software drivers for all major operation systems and APIs.
Video-out support (NTSC/PAL) TV system providing best-of-class TV-out functionality at high resolutions.
Support LCD output with DVI connect, the resolution up to 1600x1200

In the box

1x GeForce 4 Ti4600
2x DVI to VGA adaptors
1x S-Video in/out cable
1x Firewire PCI card (4 port)
1x Firewire cable
1x Gainward WinDVD Software CD
1x Gainward Drivers and Utilities CD
1x Serious Sam game CD
1x Wincoder and WinProducer CD

Ok so now that's out of the way, let's take a good look at it all.

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