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, like Abit and MSI to name a few, cut their teeth in the motherboard market. They've been diversifying their product line, including the video card sector. The Asus Geforce 4 Ti4400 V8440 we'll be looking at today is their mid-range GeForce 4 offering. For those of you who don't already know, the Ti4400 is discontinued now, as nVidia, other than getting their GeForce FX out to market, is busy pumping out AGP8x Ti4200s and Ti4600s. Despite being a AGP4x part, the Ti4400 should still prove to be a decent performer, but will its pricetag be justified? We'll be determining that later on in the review.
We covered the GeForce 4 Ti4600 technology previously, so if you haven't read it yet, we encourage you to check it out, as other than the clock speeds, both cards are identical. Knowing that, let's just dive right into the review.
The Card
 
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A rather plain box houses the Asus Ti4400. I am also not sure about the Pegasus imagery, but what do I know?
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As with the Ti4600s, the Ti4400 is one big card. Depending on your motherboard, and ram slot placement, you'll have to be careful if you've never handled a Titanium card before. The card is dressed in a nice purple PCB, making it different from the standard green we're used to seeing.
 
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Asus breaks away from nVidia's reference heatsink, and places a more "orbish" cooler on it. The stock cooler does a fair job, but not at the level of the Tt GF4 Copper Cooler. The heatsink pops right off after loosening a couple push pins, revealing the NV25 core underneath. Luckily, Asus uses regular thermal paste, which is much better than a thermal adhesive, and makes changing coolers or thermal compound much easier.
The Ti4400 is exactly the same as those found in the other Titaniums except it is clocked at 275MHz, as opposed to 300MHz for the Ti4600 and 250MHz for the Ti4200.
 
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The Conexant video encoder is present on the Asus Ti4400. What does this mean? Well, to begin with, the S-Video port will not only function as TV-out, but you will also be able to capture video.
Like most Ti4600 cards, Asus stuck with Samsung BGA DDR SDRAM, P/N K4D26323RA-GC36. Rated at 275MHz (550MHz DDR), our card's ram was clocked at the nVidia recommended 275MHz.
 
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Rounding things out are the I/O connections. nView is supported, and Asus includes DVI-to-VGA+DVI splitter connection. There is also a S-Video out cable for piping your images to TV.
Overclocking
I installed our good ole CoolBits hack and proceeded to testing. Depending on your driver version, nothing might happen when you install CoolBits. What you'll need to do is go into your registry, navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\NVIDIA Corporation\Global\NVTweak, and create a new dword value called CoolBits. Give this a value of 3, and you'll be all set.
Using the stock cooling, we pushed the Asus Ti4400 to GeForce 4 Ti4600 speeds (300/650), which was met no problems. It was time to push a little harder, and we ended up with a core of 308MHz (up 33MHz), and the ram reached 703MHz (up from 550MHz). I was certain we could get a little more out of the core and memory, so I slapped our Tt GF4 Copper Cooler on it and we got as high as 317 core, 706 memory. I should mention that the card was not 100% stable at these speeds, and there was some noticable artifacting present. Clocking back down to 310/704 made for our most stable OC.
Test Setup
Epox 8RDA+ nForce2: Athlon XP 2000+, 2 x 256MB Crucial PC2700 Ram, Asus Geforce 4 Ti4400, 120GB Western Digital SE 8MB Cache, Windows XP SP1, nForce 2 Unified Driver Package 2.0, Detonator 41.09.
We'll be pitting the Asus Geforce 4 Ti4400 against itself in overclocked mode (310/704), a PNY Ti4600, as well as a Radeon 9700 Pro. The test software will be as follows:
3D Mark 2001 SE
Unreal Tournament 2003
Code Creatures
Quake 3 Arena
Jedi Knight 2
Return to Castle Wolfenstein
All tests will be run at 1280x1024 and up. As we've seen in past reviews, 1024 and under is simply no challenge for todays performance video cards.
Next Page - OpenGL Benchmarks and AntiAliasing
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Asus Geforce 4 Ti4400 V8440: Although production has been discontinued, the Ti4400 can be readily found at a variety of vendors. With performance between that of the Ti4600 and the Ti4200, and a price that reflects that, is a Ti4400 still worth consideration?
