Overclocking
Given that this is the fastest video card produced by nVidia, does has this card reached its limit in clock speed. Or is the fact that it has been built on a 'mature' 0.15µ design mean that it has plenty of overhead left in it? Before we go further please note that these results are not representative of all the MSI Ti4600-VT2D8X cards. So what kind of memory and GPU are behind this card?
With all the thermal paste applied, and the large heatsink that was on both sides of the card, did this help overclocking. How about the , or the A1 stepping of the 4800, do they provide any improvement in overclocking? The results speak for themselves as seen below.
These results are rather poor, as the memory only overclocks about 12Mhz (25DDR), and the core only improves by 6MHz. This is one of the poorest overclocks I've seen in a video card, as even my Parhelia which is a hotter card with a smaller cooler, is able have a higher improvement than this card. So based on this one sample the overclocking ability isn't that good on this card, but your results may well vary.
DVD Decoding
One area that I was really interested with the release of the GeForce 4 series was the inclusion (finally) of hardware IDCT and MC support. These features should allow for a lower CPU usage while watching DVD movies, and can help those with low specification computers (<500MHz) be able to watch DVD movies without the fear of the video playing in a 'choppy' manner. Also the support for HDTV 1080i video is a nice addition for any who have such a TV on hand and are looking to output video from their computers, though I haven't seen a component connector on any Nvidia cards, yet. So let us quickly look at whether this IDCT hardware support will lower CPU usage against the Matrox Parhelia (Motion Compensation support only) and the G400 (no DVD decoding support) on the test XP1800+. The test movie was a 4:51 second VOB file from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Episode 3 (VTS_03_2.VOB).
| |
Total CPU Time |
CPU Time (%) |
| MSI Ti4800-VT2D8X: |
34sec |
11.93 |
| MSI GF4MX 440: |
35sec |
12.28 |
| Matrox Parhelia: |
41sec |
14.39 |
| Matrox G400: |
3:42 |
77.96 |
We can note that the MSI card does slightly better than the Parhelia, improving upon its CPU time by about 2%. The G400 managed a horrible 78% CPU utilization on the XP1800+ used for testing.
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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.
