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After what seems to have been an eternity , the GF4 ti4200 is finally here , this is the Winfast  64MB version , I dont know how long it will be before the 128meg ver. arrive , but hopefully it wont be to long . The first thing to be noticed is the smaller physical size of the ti4200 card , good news for anyone who may have put of there purchase of a ti4400 / ti4600 because of ,  lack of space , inside there case . The Current price on this card is $395 from MSY , only a few dollars more than the GF3 ti200 range of cards and even cheaper than some GF3 cards , come to think of it .

You'll want to use the Winfast Drivers that come with the card as the GF4 ti4200 is so new that older drivers may not support it . Here are the card features:

• Nvidia 4th-generatioin 256-bit GeForce4 Ti 4200 GPU
• nfiniteFX™ II Engine
• 64 or 128MB fast DDR Memory
• 8.8 GB/sec Memory Bandwidth
• Accuview Antialiasing™ Engine
• 4.4 Billion AA samples per second fill rate
• 113 million vertices/sec Peak Vertex Processing Rate
• 1.12 trillion operations/sec
• On-board TV-out support up to 1024x768 resolution
• On-board DVI support up to 1600x1200 resolution
• High-quality HDTV/DVD playback
• Nvidia video Processing engine (VPE)
• Full acceleration for Microsoft DirectX 8.1 and OpenGL 1.3 ICD
• Comprehensive AGP 4X support 
• Integrated 350MHz RAMDAC, resolution up to 2048x1536, True Color @ 60Hz
• Full version games and utilities bundle include: Tom Claney's Rogue Spear-Black Thorn, Aquanox, Master Rallye and Games Gallery) WinFastDVD, Colorific, 3Deep, True Internet Color and Cult3D.

• Leadtek WinFox II system Utility  

Hardware Features
Nvidia nfiniteFX™ II Engine
Dual Programmable Vertex Shaders
Advanced Programmable Pixel Shaders
Nvidia Accuview™ Antialiasing
Nvidia latest nView technology
3D Textures
Shadow Buffers
8 texels per clock cycle
Dual cube environment mapping
64 or 128MB high-speed DDR RAM memory
High-Definition video Processor (HDVP)
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
Multibuffering (double, triple, quad) for smooth animation and video playback
DirectX and S3TC texture compression support
OpenGL 1.3 ICD support

cooling solution:
on-board active heat-sink cooling fan

AGP Standard:
AGP 2.0 slot support

TV-out:
TV-out up to 1024x768 resolution

Driver support:
Win 2K,  ME, Win 98, Win XP

System Requirements:
Intel Pentium II/III/Celeron, Pentium 4
AMD Athlon/XP/Duron
(systems with AGP 2.0 Slot)

SYSTEM SPECS :

EPOX 8K3A , MAXTOR ATA133 7200RPM , 256meg PC2700 SAMSUNG , SOUNDBLASTER LIVE VALUE , XP1700 @ 9.5 X 166FSB = 1577MHZ , 50X CD-ROM , 32x8x4 CD-RW  , W98SE , DIRECT X 8.I .

To test the performance of this card , I will be using 3Dmark2001 and Quake , so lets get to it . ( FSB 166mhz , PCI / AGP   33 / 66 mhz )

3Dmark2001 = 8069 3Dmarks

Quake : Settings

GL Driver = Default

GL Extensions = ON

Video Mode = 1280 x 1024

Color Depth = 32 Bit

Full screen = On

Lighting = Light Map

Geometric Detail = High

Texture Quality = Default

Texture Filter = Bilinear

Texture Detail = Default

Quake results :

Time to do some overclocking , and see just how much extra we can get  , so strap your boots on and lets go :

Using the Winfox utility that comes with the Winfast drivers , I got a bit brave and pushed the core clock from 250mhz to 300mhz and the MEM clock speed from 500mhz to 551mhz, resulting in 3Dmark 2001 locking up . Well on rebooting I went into the BIOS and increased the DIMM voltage to 2.7v and on completing the boot set the Core clock to a more reasonable 276mhz and left the MEM at 551mhz . The result was a score of 8310 3Dmarks . Next I tried 286mhz for the Core clock and 575mhz for the Mem clock , resulting in a score of 8423 3Dmarks . Next I tried 292mhz for the Core clock and 591mhz for the Mem , 3Dmark2001 locked up . A sure sign that you are pushing the core to hard is when you run something like 3Dmark 2001 and get a hard lock up without any sign of artifacts / artifacts are usually a sign of pushing the Memory to hard . So backing of the Core clock to 290mhz and leaving the Mem at 591mhz , I got a score of 8495 3Dmarks . So having established my max Core clock speed at 290mhz I pushed the Mem clock speed to 601mhz and got a score of 8501 3Dmarks . Again feeling brave ( lack of artifacts ) I tried for a Mem setting of 625 mhz , which resulted in 3Dmark2001 locking up . I backed off to 619mhz on the Mem and got some artifacts and a lock up , so backing of once again this time to 609mhz ,no artifacts and I got a score of 8514 3Dmarks . Well thats not bad at all , thats almost a 20% overclock across the board , and a nice increase in the 3Dmark2001 score from : 8069 3Dmarks to 8514 3Dmarks and from 250core / 500mem to 290core / 609mem on the Core and Mem clock settings .

CONCLUSION:

I have to admit that the Winfast GF4 ti4200 64meg video card is a lot of value for the money , esp considering the games package it comes with . If you have been waiting and cant wait any longer then I can certainly recommend this card , its almost half the price of the GF4 ti4600 , and fully featured , giving very good overclocking results , and best of all , you can have it now . There are still quite a few GF3 ti200 cards out there costing more than this Winfast GF4 ti4200 card . Me thinks that the choice of what to buy in the 300 to 400 Dollar range just got a little easier in the Graphics card market . The only question that comes to mind is how long before the 128meg cards get here , how much will they be and how good .

Matt Korhonen