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When the GeForce 4 series was released at the beginning of 2002 most people were amazed at the level of performance it offered. The GF4 was just a improvement on the GeForce 3, but it offered enough in the way of improvements to be a good deal faster than any other card on the market at that time. The TI4600 was the 'fastest' card from about Feburary of 2002 to August of the same year, a title it held for about 6 months. During this time many companies built video cards based on this chipset, and we have reviewed a couple of them previously (PNY, ASUS, and Visiontek to name a few).
But as with most video cards the title of fastest video card didn't last forever. A couple of months ago ATi released the Radeon 9700Pro, which managed to beat the 4600 by a very large margin when the CPU wasn't limiting it. With the release of the GeForce FX a ways away, Nvidia 'needed' to release something to bridge the gap between the 4600 and the 9700. So the marketing department at Nvidia decided to add AGP 8X support to both the TI4600 and the MX440. In the case of the 440 this also included an increase in both core speed and memory speed, as we saw with the MSI-8888 we reviewed previously. With the TI4600-4800 there is no clock speed increase.
MSI has made some very good cards that we have reviewed here at Viperlair. The 8X AGP MX440 impressed us with its 40%+ overclock (perhaps due to a mature 0.15µ process) and 'good' quality 2D and video in. So has MSI continued to make good quality video cards? Let us see.
The MSI GeForce 4 Ti4600-VT2D8X (with Video-in, TV-out, Dual DVI supports and AGP8X)
With so many other TI4600 video cards on the market how can MSI differentiate themselves from the competition? Let's look at the card itself to see if it will stand out by it's design and it's extras (if it has any). For a more detailed specification sheet of this card please check .
In the package we received:
- MSI GeForce 4 Ti4600-VT2D8X
- Manual
- 10 CD's of games etc.
- ViVo connector
- 6" S-VHS cable
- DVI-VGA adaptor
- MSI Case badge
What can we see about the card with the bundle that is included with it. First the box, as all MSI products looks the part it's supposed to play, that of catching your attention on the shelf. It tells you basically what you need to know about the card without you having to even pick up the box. The back of the box gives a more detailed description of what the card looks like as well as more information on the bundled products. The card itself is very big, larger than any other card I've used, but this is pretty standard for any GF4 Ti4600.
The card uses a unique cooling technology known as "". Here's a bit from their site:
T.O.P (Thermal Obviation Protection) represents MSI’s cutting edge technology in designing the new-generation copper cooler especially for Ti4200-8X and Ti4600-8X graphics cards. For general users, the cooling performance and the silence are two key requirements of a high-quality VGA cooler, also called Fan-sink. The cooling performance is directly related to the stability of the new-generation GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) and prevents from overheat when overclocking. On the other hand, as the GPU is becoming more complicated and powerful, the silence of a qualified VGA cooler is more important than ever because the total system cooling requirement and noise is getting higher.
A couple of strong points about the cooler is that it's all copper, providing better heat disappation that nVidia's reference cooler (9.7625 °C better according to their tests), as well as generating only 28db, making it very quiet.
The heatsink itself is very large, not as large as some (Leadtek comes to mind) but still manages to cover GPU and RAM on both sides of the card. However there was one problem with the heatsink, when I received it the back heatsink portion was loose, as can be seen in the second last picture, not something I like to see in a video card.
The card also has two DVI ports on the back of the card, but only has support for one VGA monitor out of the box. The ViVo box is included as it was with other MSI cards that use ViVo. The manual included is very nice and does cover much of the detail about all of the video cards Let us look at the software that is included with the package.
Next Page - Included Software
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G4Ti4600-VT2D8X: With the GeForce FX still MIA, we take a look at their current flagship, the GeForce 4 Ti4600, souped up with AGP8x. The MSI version also breaks away from reference by including their own cooling system.
