Abit Siluro GF4 Ti4200-8x OTES 128Mb video card review

Today we received a specimen of the new ABIT Siluro Ti4200 OTES video card with support for the AGP8X and 128 MB DDR SDRAM.

The card is built on the new NV28 chip whose major difference from NV25 is the support for AGP8x. On the face of it, the specimen is practically identical to the formerly tested GF4 Ti4200 OTES, so we aren't going to dwell much on the card itself. Let me remind the pros and cons though:

Cons:

• No control for the cooler rotational speed;
• No cooling of the memory chips and no way installing third-party sets;
• Very high noise levels in the nominal mode;

Pros:

• The chip and memory run at speeds pre-clocked to the Ti4400 levels;
• Hot air is expelled off the PC case, which substantially improves the thermal conditions of the CPU unit;
• The overclocking potential of the chip has been increased;
• Turbine tuning is more important than tuning the coolers for standard GeForce 4 Ti4200's.

OTES Ti4200 vs. Ti4200-8x, package bundle

So, what has been changed in Abit Siluro Ti4200 OTES AGP8X (128Mb) as compared with the previous NV25-based version? First, the card now offers 128, not 64 MB memory onboard. The board comes bundled in more costly packaging and features more impressive bundle. Let's dwell on that in more detail.

The package design of ABit GF4 Ti4200-8x OTES

The package design hasn't been changed much: the overall color has been changed, the fresco has been shaded which made it look absolutely illegible, plus an opening has been cut out in the reverse side of the box through which the card becomes visible (with the cooling system as the "center of its digital universe"). But the box itself has been changed radically - it used to be made of cardboard, now it is made of transparent plastic through which you can see the card itself and the documentation with the wiring.

The wiring and the documentation haven't undergone any changes, that is, the same Apple Mac style transparent plastic is there. The documentation is now of a different color, plus some OTES cooler promos added. The bundled software kit has turned much richer indeed. This time the famous freeware game US.ARMY is part of the bundle plus one more CD of interesting miscellaneous software has been added. The latter CD offers a visual WindowsXP theme, Soldier of Fortune II demo, and EarthViewer demo. An OTES sticker on the CPU unit deserves a special mention. If things are going on that way, just a glance at the face of the CPU unit would suffice to tell the PC configuration.

Layout

As I mentioned earlier, at first glance the board makes almost no difference to the GF4 Ti4200 OTES (but for the color). On the card there is a Ti4200 chip with support for AGP8x, which is seen from its marking. The memory is made up of Samsung chips (Hynix, in the previous version), has the same access time as in the previous board - 3.6 ns, which is approximately equivalent to 225 MHz (550MHz DDR).

Like before, the chip and memory run at pre-overstated speeds equivalent to the laid off Ti4400, but this time the card is closer to the true Ti4400 since it features 128MB memory onboard. Therefore, Abit's pricing policies is quite understandable, since the 4200-8x is going to sell at the price of Ti4400's, i.e. it will cost between $200 and $250. When nVidia was laying off the Ti4400, the company justified it by the insufficient demand for these chips although rumors had it the chip was being laid off because the higher-end Ti4600 brother was failing to withstand competition at the 'price/performance' ratio, i.e. the demand for the top-end Ti4600 was going down thus leaving the company without a hefty share of would-be profits. Well, we have diverted far in our reasoning.. Let's turn back to the object in question.

First, let's point out the differences of the PCB design. As you can see from the photos, there are differences between the PCBs. What has been amended is the module close to the AGP socket (clearly seen on the photo, at the back), as well as the layout of the 10 capacitors on the front between the chip and the AGP socket. The TV-OUT and other outlets have also been amended: the number of elements has stayed the same, but they all have been slightly displaced. What is interesting, the arrangement of many captions all over the PCB has been changed either. The main components as well as memory have stayed where they used to be - no changes. That means - even though the wiring has been re-worked, it doesn't make noticeable differences from the base design. Let me remind you that the outputs, D-Sub 15, DVI and S-Video as well as the air expulsion opening, have been brought to the rear strap taking up TWO slots.

Overclocking

Of special mention is that the overclocking efficiency varies for each particular board, and that our card succeeded in running at such frequencies does not mean your card will be runnable at these. And vice versa, it's quite probable that your OTES Ti4200-8x will overclock much better than ours.

Benchmarks

To test the performance of ABit GeForce 4 Ti4200 AGP 8x with the OTES cooling system we assembled these two test systems:

Test system No. 1 (Hi-End system):

• Processor Intel Pentium 4 2.8 GHz;
• Motherboard - Intel 850EMV (i850E, 512 Mb RDRAM PC800), AGP 4x);
• Sound card Creative Sound Blaster Audigy;
• HDD Seagate Barracuda ATA IV 7200 rpm.

Test system No 2 (Mid-Range system):

• AMD Athlon XP2000+ processor;
• Motherboard Gigabyte 7VAX (KT400, 256MB DDR PC2100 memory, AGP 8x);
• Integrated audio codec;
• HDD - IBM IC35AVVA07 7200 rpm.

We tested the OTES performance in the following benchmarks and applications:

• Return to Castle Wolfenstein - Checkpoint demo (OpenGL, Quake 3 core);
• Unreal Tournament 2003 Demo (Direct3D stress test benchmark);
• DooM III E3 Demo (extremely resource-hungry overkill benchmark with shaders, bump-mapping, OpenGL and lots of other stuff to be topical by the end of 2003);
• Codecreatures demo (complex DirectX 8 benchmark);
• 3DMark 2001SE (synthetic Direct3D benchmark).

Prior to moving to the comparative tables, let me note there was nothing to complain about the 2D quality of these cards during the operation. At high resolutions with the refresh rate 85 Hz, the 2D quality was on par with that of the whole GeForce4Ti line, i.e. a bit above the average.

Return to Castle Wolfenstein

On the graph that was produced, you can see a quite amusing situation. At lower resolutions, the card fully match the higher-end GeForce Ti4600 chip. This trend preserves until the 1024x768 resolution, and then the card showed a performance level taking the interim position between the GeForce Ti4600 and GeForce Ti4200 OTES with 64Mb memory. While at lower resolutions the cards compete for grabbing the most of the processor, at higher we clearly see what each card is worth.

If we disregard the would-be performance boost contributed by the AGP8x since the motherboard on the first test system did not support that standard, we can conclude the performance gain was achieved thanks to the memory capacity increased to 128 MB. Another cause might be the optimizations introduced into NV28 as compared with NV25.

Unreal Tournament 2003 DEMO

And again the card made the best showing - performance boost is seen in all the higher resolutions and what is more, in this benchmark the Ti4200-8x chip overclocked to the level of Ti4400 is persistently taking the lead over the Ti4600 by 1 or 2 frames per second. Compared to the 64 MB model running at the same frequencies the performance gain is quite essential.

DooM III E3 Demo (build alpha v0.02)

In testing under DooM III we followed the techniques and demo files described in the article "DooM III as a benchmark". Note that the test results in this alpha version can not be the grounds for discussing the shortcomings and advantages of the board since the core of the game is complete by no more than 2%.

The trend is similar over here. The card performs better than Ti4600 at lower clock speeds with the equal memory capacity. It persistently runs faster than its higher-end brother based on the NV25 and with 64 MB memory. It's also interesting to note that DooM is a real torture for the whole video subsystem and runs under OpenGL, but the test result stays the same as in the previous case, which proves the consistency of results.

Codecreatures demo

In this benchmark, things have changed and much resemble RTCW although this test is harder and more demanding to the hardware resources. In fact, at the stress upon the video system and processor, Codecreatures is closest of all to Doom3. The card being tested is a bit slower than GeForce Ti4600 and much faster than its previous version. The performance boost in Codecreatures is also related to the fact that this benchmark is demanding to the memory onboard the accelerator, that's why a so big difference is seen between the 64 MB and 128 MB.

3DMark 2001SE

Now one to the classic benchmark from MadOnion (recently renamed to Futuremark Corp). In 3DMark 2001 we see the following: the speed of the accelerator being tested in fact is on par with GeForce 4 Ti4200 OTES 64Mb, up to the 1280x1024 resolution. But at 1600x1200 the 64MB OTES card was running short of the local memory. But in any case the gap between Ti4600 is so negligible that you won't notice it by appearance.

What to expect from the AGP8x?

To answer this question, we did tests on our second test system. In that, we installed a KT400-based motherboard with support for AGP8x (3.0). Originally, we wanted to test the card in the two modes, AGP4x and AGP8x, by simply changing the AGP port speed settings in the motherboard's BIOS, but to our surprise we didn't find them in there. We also failed to do so with whatever software tools. Finally, we decided to do this: we took the GeForce4 Ti4600 128Mb and reduced the clock speeds to the level of GeForce4 Ti4200-OTES (Ti4400), which is equivalent to 275MHz of the chip frequency and 550 MHz DDR memory frequency. As a result, we got two video cards identical in many ways with the differences being in the NV25 without support for AGP8x which one of the cards featured. Here are the benchmark results.

In this benchmark you can see a quite interesting thing. It turned out that performance at high resolutions with the AGP8x enabled fully matches our imaginary analog having no support for the AGP8x which we built from the Ti4600 with reduced frequencies. The graph is notable also for the low-resolution results since the Ti4600 is absolutely identical to the Ti4600 with understated frequencies, and Ti4200-8x is identical to the regular Ti4200 without 8x and with merely 64 MB onboard. As is seen from the benchmark, no real performance boost from using the AGP8x is observed.

In this test there's an evident performance boost up to the Ti4600 level at high resolutions, but it is not due to AGP8x since a similar thing was seen already on the first test system that does not support AGP8x. In all the other respects, the card was not an excellent performer at low resolutions.

The trend is the same in other benchmarks as well, so there's no need to publish them. After conducted tests we can claim with a certain degree of confidence that currently there is no PRACTICAL advantage from using AGP8x in your PC. In future, this will change owing to a number of reasons. This will change primarily because of the increased amount of geometry and auxiliary data transferred to the accelerator and of course thanks to quality improvements in games. Later, we'll be doing some synthetic benchmarks in order to find out on which conditions the AGP8x will be of real benefit to the accelerator.

Is it worth having 128 MB on board your video card?

This question is perhaps the most frequently asked by users who face the choice of the right mid-end accelerator. As long as 3 years ago there were hot debates in the press as to whether it makes sense paying for the difference between 8 and 12 MB memory on the accelerator; today many believe 64MB would suffice for most games and it's still a long time when the 128MB on board becomes a must-have. In the previous review when analyzing the performance tests we saw quite a big difference between the GeForceTi4600 and the GeForceTi4200 chip overclocked to the level of Ti4400. This difference is especially visible when running resource-intensive benchmarks like Codecreatures at high resolutions with great number of objects in the scenes and lots of high-definition textures.

The finding is evident - there's a lack of local memory of the video card. Of course, AGP is able making up for its capacity, but not the speed. In the beginning of the article I mentioned the marketing and technologies, so the situation in here is very similar. The benchmarks show that at performance the card is on par with GeForceTi4600. Although the AGP8x is frequently mentioned in names, drivers and whatever places, the truth is it's not the AGP8x that helped achieve the performance boost but the increased amount of local memory. One of our test systems does not have support for AGP8x, nevertheless the performance in resource-intensive benchmarks was noticeably higher. The main difference of this card from the previous model, in terms of marketing, is the AGP8x, but that the board already features the memory capacity twice as great is kept in the shadow. In the end, the common user concludes that performance gain has been increased thanks to using the AGP8x, although this conclusion is far from reality.

There are two real true conclusions. The first one is - currently, there's not much sense in AGP8x. The second - if you intend to use your video card in new games and applications, then the 128 MB of local memory in it is a must-have.

General conclusions

The card demonstrated excellent performance and stability, and is quite on par with GeForce Ti4600. Moreover, the good package bundle and attractive price (about $210 currently) make it attractive for most users. Unfortunately, it's only no more than the lack of local memory that Abit has solved, but that has had a positive effect on the overall performance. The noise made by the cooling system and lack of rotation control in the very fast cooler (7200 rpm) have remained intact from the previous version, which is disappointing. The noise is a trade-off for the pre-overstated frequencies since the card runs at a speed specific for the GeForce4 Ti4400. All in all, Abit made a high-quality and well-balanced product at a price quite acceptable for video cards of this market segment.

Pros:

• 128 MB memory available;
• OTES cooling system;
• Frequencies on the chip and memory pre-overstated to the Ti4400;
• Good package bundle;
• Good 'price/performance' ratio.

Cons:

• Immense noise from the cooling system;
• Lack of cooling on the memory;
• Poor memory overclocking potentials.