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ABit Siluro GF4 Ti4200Date: 26/11/2002
The modern computer is in a way a vacuum cleaner that passes through innumerable cubic meters of air and dust. In those times when trees and mainframes were large and the CPU clock speeds measured in few megahertz, desktop equipment used to run fine without active cooling. For the modern PC user, those quiet times have gone for good - fans inside the computer made their homes on the CPU, on the motherboard chips, in the power supply, on the accelerator and even on the hard disks. Some overclocking enthusiasts make a liking for that stuff, but those who see the PC as merely a task tool and have to leave the computer running round the clock are not so excited about the high decibel whizz generated by modern cooling systems. Try falling asleep and relaxing in the immense roar coming from the turbine-like cooler placed on the Pentium 4 2.8 GHz while the processor is running SysMark. If you succeeded in that, then your nervous system is extremely robust and adaptive. Most of us can't boast such extreme abilities. Meanwhile, the modern system can't run without effective cooling. The CPU clock speeds have overstepped the threshold of three thousand megahertz, the graphics chips clock speeds have turned 300 MHz, disks in HDDs rotate at speeds over 7000 RPM. All this hardware emits kilowatts of heat which needs to be dissipated. Unlike the hype and scoop accompanying the evolution of processors and accelerators, cooling systems evolve almost inconspicuously. The news that a processor has got past the point of a further gigahertz is perceived as a national celebration. But who on earth will jump with joy on hearing about the release of a new cooler or more effective cooling system? You never know ...
By complexity, the modern graphics chip is identical to the CPU. The emitted heat is warming up not the accelerator alone, but the system on the whole, thus worsening its stability. The conventional means of cooling the powerful graphics chips implies using an active cooler made up of a small radiator with the fan blowing about it placed on top of the chip. The used air warmed up by the radiator fins is thrown into the system, then dragged over to the CPU where it is warmed up more by its own radiator, run through the power supply and released off the system. Maybe it makes sense inventing a way to release the air consumed by the accelerator off the PC case? Today we'll be looking into a not quite conventional solution, the OTES cooling system, presented by Abit for video cards mostly based on the nVidia GeForce 4 chips. The GeForce 4 Ti4200 chipThe core was announced later than their higher-end brothers Ti4600 and Ti4400. By the way, the latter was laid off for various reasons. In fact, all the video cards in the GeForce Ti line differ in the memory and core speeds only. It means if we install faster memory and overclock the chip a bit, we can get a board of the Ti4400 class or even 4600 at much lower price.
Let's take a quick look at the specifications:
As you can see, the GeForce 4 Ti 4200 was originally created for filling in the price niche between the top-end Ti4600 accelerators and the low-end line based on the NV17 (GeForce mx420440460). In reality, it turned out that the card is second to Ti4600, at almost half the price.
At this we are finishing with the introductory theoretical part and turning to the board itself, which we received for tests. Recommended design vs. tuningIf we face the sad truth, the current sector of Hi-End 3D accelerators is shared between nVidia and ATi, while sure outsiders like Matrox or alternative manufacturers like 3DLabs have minimum weight on the market. As a result, the choice or really good chipsets is not that great. It's not our goal to describe ATi policies, since the review is focused on nVidia-based video card. nVidia offers manufacturers the reference board design which is then altered by the manufacturer in a whatever way. Various ways lead to high performance: the vast majority of manufacturers start tampering with the BIOS settings to squeeze out increased speeds in the chips thus running the risk of degraded stability; others concentrate their efforts on developing an alternative design or use more wired multilayered PCBs. dig the recommendations throughout and inside out and will achieve a stable functioning of specially selected chips; some might try building their own cooling system. Abit followed the latter path and after difficult confinement gave birth to OTES.The nVidia GeForce 4 Ti4200 chip is taking a special niche on the market. On the one hand, it is the weakest in the GeForce 4 Ti line, on the other, its overclocking potentials are good and the witchcraft of squeezing out performance is worth the efforts. As a result, you can get a product having increased performance at the same low price, which the press will receive with outstretched arms. Most important in this tuning is not to kill the line of top-end products, because it is not easy a task to explain to the buyer why he should buy Ti4600 rather than overclocked Ti4200. Here alternative approach applies - for example, with the 'tuning' option the memory capacity is reduced by half, which entails less headaches for the marketing department.
Abit Siluro GF4 Ti4200 video cardThe ABit Siluro GF4 Ti4200 OTES video card is made on a dark-brown or blue PCB, as many other Abit video cards are. Two makes of this video card came to our test lab simultaneously- the Abit's Moscow office tore a blue board from their hearts :), while a brown board with a shining copper bracket came from Taiwan. We couldn't find any other fundamental differences between them.
The superficial resemblance with other accelerators ends with the textolyte color. The video card is in many ways based on the original nVidia design, but there are some eye-catching essential differences. First, it is the OTES turbine. The second is the twofold strap that takes two slots on the rear case panel. By the way, this may hinder installation of the board inside the case where stiffening ribs are fitted between the openings. Prior to buying an OTES video card, take a look at your PC case - what if the board doesn't fit inside it?
On the keeper strip there are three connectors - one for plugging in a DVI monitor, one for D-Sub 15 pin and one S-VHS for plugging in a TV-set. As you can see, with this combination it's not possible to connect two LCD panels. On the other hand, it is a Ti4200 and it is very unlikely that owners of $150 video cards might wish to plug in two expensive 17"+ LCD monitors. In the shipment bundle there is an adapter for plugging in a second monitor. We won't dwell on it, it's quite a standard thing, except the milk-white color. What is more, with Siluro GF4 OTES you can't connect a TV-set through a composite input without a special adapter. Besides the mentioned connectors, on the strap there is an opening for releasing the circulating air off the PC case. On the board there a Ti 4200 chip with A3 stepping manufactured on the 26th week of the year, which is about in early June.
The 64 MB DDR memory on 8 chips is soldered on both sides of the PCB the same way as it in the original design, four on each side. The memory is made up of Hyundai-Hynix chips with the access time 3.6 ns, which is approximately equivalent to 275 MHz (550 DDR). Repeating it that the cooling and ordinary blowing of memory are not organized at all, but that is a serious shortcoming for such a video board, since Ti4200 seems to be extremely popular with those who are after overclocking and saving some extra bucks.
One of the things that make the Abit board stand out from the reference design is that the D-Sub and TV-Out connectors are carried over to the child board that is linked to the main one with a pin connector. It's remarkable that the original wiring for the connector is placed under the cooler and is simply not used. That hasn't affected the 2D quality, anyway it's just here where we can't vouch for the whole line. This issue is specific to each video board. The child video board is screened from below and on the whole is made very well. Retail bundleThe video card that we received comes bundled in an ordinary cardboard box. The cover is emblazoned with light colors and Maya themes, in particular, it is the world's famous picture with allegedly an astronaut's figure. For us it's pleasant to see that Abit has finally done away with nonstandard triangular boxes in which Siluro GeForce 3 used to be shipped.
The retail bundle is traditionally minimal. All in all, the company is trying to keep the ~150$ price down by cutting down on the bundled software where the games set is minimized. For Russia, this is surely a definite plus. In any case, Ti4200 is definitely not a top-end product, and saving on whatever items is just to the point. The card comes bundled with the following:
It's worth mentioning that all the bundled cables and adapters have a rather tricky design and are made of semitransparent flexible plastic. As is always the case, we recalled the Jobbs' products. In our opinion, it looks quite impressive.
The drivers CD comes bundled with the following software & utilities:
What is curious is that after installing the rated drivers you won't be able to install ABit Graphic Max. On the VGA Utilities tab only one software is accessible:
I couldn't find any intelligible notes describing how to invoke the utility and why it is disabled (greyed-out). For our tests, we installed the most recent reference detonator. Comparative tests have shown that the bundled drivers are far more slower, especially in Doom III E3 Demo. TV-OutThe board is equipped with the by now classical GeForce chip Philips 7104 that is also not free of serious shortcomings despite being a universal solution.
Among the flaws is that the maximum resolution of image displayed on TV is restricted to 800x600; moreover, the displayed image has several artifacts typical of that chip (like borders around the image, sometimes the image is displaced with the color transfer inadequate) as well as the system may run unstably under voltage drops. For example, a powered-on fridge may easily re-set the image which can be restored only upon a complete PC reboot. Another shortcoming is that image display is impossible without a splitting adapter. In all the other ways, the TV-out runs flawlessly.
OTES - space technologies in desktop PCs.The OTES (Outside Thermal Exhaust System) can be called with some reserve a novelty on the 3D accelerators market. Not long ago a similar system was demonstrated on eVGA accelerators which successfully avoided wide publicity. This alone would be more than enough to award Abit with one other three prizes, the first for the original and nice cooling system. Another prize which Abit wins in the tests described below is for the superb cooling of the GPU core. But the third prize we award Abit for the nasty cooling of the graphic memory. Things are aggravated by that basically the card can't be upgraded and the memory issue can't be improved somehow.
Meanwhile, the situation is indeed serious. While with the ordinary cooler the hot air circulation somehow organized, with OTES all the air is simply expelled away from the case. What is more, the OTES is so large that it's impossible to install third-party radiators on the memory. To be more precise, this can be done on the rear side of the boards and on the memory located along the board's end side. And this is impossible for the upper chips half covered by a cooling element. In the end, any tuning is ineffective and not to the point. What exactly is OTES, what does it do, and how good is it at its intended purpose? The OTES abbreviation stands for "Outside Thermal Exhaust System". The system is based on the so-called "heatpipe scheme".
The heatpipe is a pipe in which there is some small amount of easily evaporating liquid (e.g. freon used in refrigerators) circulating around it which then evaporates on the hotter side, travels back down to the start of the pipe, and starts the process over again. The process is absolutely standalone and does not require external replenishment and follows the fundamental laws of physics. Such systems were first used in cosmonautics around 40 years ago. One of the reasons for using heatpipes is the space limitations and impossibility to provide cooling in the heated spot. Today heatpipes are common and are most popular for cooling notebooks. The essence of the method is that heat is effectively transferred to the radiator where it is carried off while being blown. Later this technology acquired wide application in radio electronics and afterwards in the computer industry. Besides notebooks, heatpipes were implemented in processor coolers as well, in particular, in Master DP5-5K11. Furthermore, at the Californian Intel Developers Forum several companies demonstrated similar cooling solutions for desktop PCs. As the heat intensity and compactness of desktop systems progress, there won't be other methods for their cooling.
But let's come back to OTES. In this case all is implemented in the following scheme: the fan installed on top of the graphic chip does not cool it directly, but simply swallows ambient air and channels it through the established duct over to the outlet in the keeper strip. Inside the duct the air is channeled through the copper radiator fins that cool one of the ends of the cooling system. The other end is in tight contact with the chip. Therefore, a chemical reaction inside the pipe starts as soon as the chip is heated to a certain extent. You can see that Abit was not supposed to install a turbine impeller right above the graphic chip. Moreover, while above it the turbine does not touch the chip at all. Equally well, Abit could have implemented air suction or displaced the turbine a bit in order to provide effective cooling of the memory chips. One of the serious OTES issues is the noise generated by the turbine. The turbine motor rotates the impeller at the speed 7200 rpm. For comparisons, in the top-end models of processor coolers the impeller rotates at the speed 5500 rpm, while quiet coolers are regarded those where the impeller rotates at the speed around 1500-2000 rpm. It's possible to reduce the OTES noise only through decelerating the turbine rotation, but there are no delicate methods for doing that - Abit has not yet devised a means for controlling the turbine rotational speed. Currently, Abit is working at OTES2 system and soon we'll be able to examine it. Below in this review we'll tell how to make OTES1 quieter.
OverclockingExpectedly, overclocking the OTES video card has given absolutely predictable results which generally justify using such cooling system, It's worth mentioning that overclocking is a masterly painstaking job requiring a lot of patience and efforts. We succeeded in overclocking the card to 315 MHz on the chip and to 300 MHz (600 MHz DDR) on the memory. It was not possible to push the memory clock speed up to over 600 MHz, - if we add even 1 MHz more, then we get artifacts specific to excessive memory overclocking. This is no surprise, since, as we noted above, the memory cooling was not organized at all. It's more interesting for the case with the chip. The GPU easily overclocked to 300 MHz and thus overstepped the threshold of GeForceTi4600 chip speed, moreover the GPU was running stably at 315 MHz. This is approximately the speed to which an average Ti4600 can be overclocked.
Between 315 MHz and 330 MHz(!) all 3D tests ran flawlessly, but artifacts we observed, which is natural because the higher the speed the more unstable is the functioning of programs. As per our observations, there is no dependence between the overclocking of GPU and memory. That is, no matter what speed the GPU is running at - the memory can be always overclocked to 600 MHz, which is the stable factual limit of overclocking achieved on our specimen of the board, at the most. Repeating again that the board's factory settings were overclocked to the Ti4400 level by default, and the card was running very stably even with the lowered turbine rotational speed in the cooling system.
TestsTo test the performance of ABit GeForce 4 Ti4200 with the OTES cooling system we assembled these two test beds:Test bed No 1 (Hi-End system):
Test bed No 2 (Mid-Range system):
We tested the OTES performance in the following benchmarks and applications:
In the tests, we produced the following results: 1. Return to Castle Wolfenstein
Upon a closer look at the two produced graphs we can see that at resolutions up to 1280x1024 the board is not falling behind GeForce 4 Ti4600. Considering the much lower price this is a really good news.
It's curious to note that with a weaker processor the board consistently lags behind Ti4600, and at lower resolutions the result is practically identical to that for GeForce 3. We can safely assert that first that the Ti4200 with OTES is meant for resolutions 1024x768 onwards or for games with FSAA disabled. Now look at the processor dependence of the card by the example of RTCW:
Note that the difference in performance is essential right up to the maximum resolutions. Return to Castle Wolfenstein is in more extent a processor dependent game, and with Athlon 1600+ everything is restricted by the processor's low performance. If we install a processor far more powerful than Pentium 4 2.8 GHz, the results at low resolutions should be much higher. Reminding you that all the measurements were carried out at the maximum quality and 32-bit color. Also, in view of this processor dependence we can assert that for those who have low-power processors it does make sense to use FSAA. In using it the bottleneck will be the accelerator itself, and the performance difference between Pentium 4 2.8 and Athlon 1600+ will be minimized. Now, on to Unreal Tournament 2003 benchmarks. 2. Unreal Tournament 2003For the tests we used an official demo version of the game. The full version of UT2003 that sells on the Russian market has some issues with testing. So far they haven't been solved yet and we'll be using the demo.
With Pentium 4 2.8 GHz the situation is similar to that observed for RTCW. The differences at low and medium speeds are minimal, and they come into play only at 1280x1024 and 1600x1200. To be fair, it's worth noting that the difference is that big - the 7 FPS difference at the maximum resolution is not worth the price difference.
On a less powerful system the trend stays the same. Now let's analyze the processor dependence:
Already at 1280x1024 the results become identical. The owners of low-power processor still can resort to FSAA which in most cases will be free at low resolutions. UT2003 is definitely a less processor dependent game and puts a much heavier load on the GPU part than in RTCW. On to the Codescreatures benchmark. 3. DooM III E3 DemoRecently, CDs with DooM III Lite have hit the retail shelves in Moscow. We strongly recommend not to buy this "game". In fact, that version of DooM III was stolen from E3 and is absolutely unsuitable for neither the multiplayer nor single-player gaming. The version 0.02 demonstrated at the expo was meant for merely displaying the potentials of the core developed by John Carmack's team, and no more. Even as a benchmark it can be used with a great reserve. The testing techniques as well as the moral and ethical issues will be covered elsewhere in a separate review.Of course, one should see Doom III in play at least once to understand what first-person shooters will look like in 2004 and - take it on trust - we'll certainly need very fast PCs to handle them. Frankly, even with Pentium 4 2.8 GHz and overclocked GeForce 4 Ti4600 the demo is running at a snail's pace. It's useless running Doom3 on Athlon 1600 or something less powerful than GeForce 3 - at best, the maximum speed won't be faster than 10 FPS, and at worst - less than 1 FPS. The alpha-version is very critical to the RAM capacity. 512 MB is the minimum amount necessary for running tests. The processor must be at least 2 GHz. What's in the upshot? We tried only one test bed of the two. But the graphics... Wow!!.. it's really fantastic, something unseen before, so let's talk about the figures:
Basically, we see a quite standard thing - GeForce 4 Ti4600 with 128 MB of memory is ahead of the pack in all the tests, including those at the minimum resolution. The game is very demanding to the gaming hardware and we can safely assert that in our case it was not the processor (P4 2.8 GHz) but the graphic accelerator that had restrictions in all the resolutions.
Tests in high resolutions exhibit a similar trend. The gap between 4200/64 and 4600/128 is not great. Playing Doom III at resolutions higher than 800x600 even on top-end configurations makes no sense. For comparisons, we recorded the second demo. The first (demo002.demo) runs in the first level, with another (demo006.demo) in the second. The alpha-version of Doom III is made up of three levels, with the complexity and geometric richness gradually rising from level to level. The first level is very easy - no complex algorithms are used for computing the object physics and not so much of the architecture is involved. The most demanding is the third level, and currently we haven't yet prepared an adequate demo to be used for testing. Now on to demo006.demo:
On the whole, the trend is the same but for the slightly reduced gap between 4200 and 4600. Presumably, for Doom III the shaders handling will be more important rather than the raw performance of the video card. Soon we'll present an additional review analyzing the Doom III phenomenon in greater detail. In the end, here are the test results produced with demo006.demo at high resolutions:
As you see, the results are predictable and haven't brought any surprises. The results on the graph are self-evident without any comments. If you remember, Quake 3 was released in the times when Voodoo3 was just about to be batch-produced but we are still using it and derived games as benchmarks up till now. Playing Doom 3 and derived games will be comfortable no earlier than late 2003 or even in mid-2004 when graphic accelerators acquire 256 or more megabytes of video memory with the speeds and potentials going several generations far ahead of GeForce 4. CodecreaturesCodescreatures on the agenda. As the tests have shown, for this game the larger video memory capacity is more important than the raw chip speed and VRAM:
From the graph we see that the 128 MB GeForce 4 shot ahead leaving the pack far behind, with the 64 MB OTES in some tests is very close to GeForce 3.
They are more closer in tests carried out with Athlon 1600+. All the advantages of Ti4200 vs. GeForce 3 have come to naught in here.
In the upshot, the total results of benchmarks don't look that impressive. The card's scores are almost 1.5 times less than for Ti4600. 3DMark 2001SEThis is one more standard benchmark which we use for examining the performance of 3D accelerators. This time, we are not bringing in the scores for each test segment. The general trend is vividly illustrated by the total results:
We are not citing separate graphs for each tests since their dynamics is generally identical to the total results.
Making OTES quieterThe author of the review has to use the PC almost round the clock and leave it running for nightly tests, sleep by the PC on those days when hundreds of megabytes of archives need to be downloaded. It's natural that the very first night spent with the OTES I had a strong desire to cut the patented rig off and throw it away because of the immense noise made. Hardly suppressing the destructive thoughts, I decided to find a way to deaden the OTES noise.The easiest way is to reduce the RPMs of the turbine. As I once said, the card we received for tests was in fact a GeForce 4 Ti 4200 with the memory and GPU speeds overclocked to a Ti 4400 level. It's quite logical that prior to degrading the performance of the cooling system it's necessary the chip clock speed be reduced to standard values with the use of the NVTweak utility. Of course, after that you can't expect a record level of performance achieved through overclocking. You would simply have to forget about the overclocking, and it's quite reasonable to reduce the operating clock speeds of the chip and memory. It's easy to revert the clock speeds back. So let's get round to describing the process.
The OTES turbine is powered from a special connector on the accelerator. The contact is made with two pins. To do a basic tuning, we'd need the following tool kit:
Take the connectors and solder the wires to them. The first of the wires is "+5V", the second is the "ground" wire. The wiring on the base is done in the following way:
As a result, we get a much slower but practically noiseless OTES. Despite that, the cooler is still quite efficient. When no hard 3D applications are used, the chip stays scarcely warm. But if you wish to run Unreal Tournament 2003 or something harder, it makes sense reverting to the normal power scheme. The second option is dynamical. For that we would need a special block able to control the fan's rotational speed. For a change, try using the block that comes bundled with Zalman or Thermaltake coolers and hook up an OTES cooler to it in parallel. Want quietness? - turn the regulator down to the minimum and you get a quiet cooler for the processor and accelerator. Want to play? - put on the ear-phones and turn all up to the maximum. We won't dwell on this in our review now - we might publish a separate article describing the tuning process in detail. FindingsIt's hard to give one-one conclusions on the OTES. On the one hand, it offers high performance, good overclocking potentials, smart and tricky cooling system that expels used air off the PC case. On the other hand, the noise levels generated by the turbine rotating at 7200 rpm is very high, it lacks radiators on the memory chips and, worse than that, you simply can't install third-party sets, plus the high price for Ti4200 as compared with competitor products.What is more, you have to worry about tuning the turbine and reducing its RPMs. With a little bit more skills you can turn the OTES into part of a noiseless PC which is more effective than other competitor solutions owing to air expulsion off the PC case. Wrapping it all up, we believe OTES is a not bad solution for those who know if it is worth paying extra dollars for the tuned accelerator model; those who own transparent stylish PC cases with highlights or windowed cases should be really happy about that. Cons:
Pros:
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