Video cards roundup: MSI versus Triplex (GeForce4 Ti4200-8x & Ti4800SE) Review
Triplex GeForce4 Ti4200-8x
The Triplex GeForce4 Ti4200-8x video card comes shipped in a large cardboard box with a transparent filmed window through which you can easily see the board.
Along with the card itself, the contents of the box is as follows: a splitter for connecting video equipment to the board's VIVO-port, an RCA-RCA cable, a DVI-VGA adapter, a drivers & utilities CD, a CyberLink PowerDirector CD with a Video Card Setup manual in English. On the whole, the package bundle is standard.
The splitter shipped in the bundle has two S-Video ports and the two composite connectors: a video-in and a TV-out. All the four connectors, as is seen on the photo, are merged into a case, which reduces the number of wires connected to the video card itself.
The Triplex GeForce4 Ti4200-8x video card looks very stylish for its silvery white PCB and silvery cooler plate covering large part of the video card from the front side. No doubt, when choosing a GeForce4 Ti4200-8x video card it's hard to pass by the Triplex's card. But let's leave out the emotions and take a closer look at the card.
First of all, the cooling system. Indeed, much focus has been given to it. Our tests of GeForce4 Ti4200-8x and my personal working experience with the video cards suggest that neither the graphics core nor the memory need intensive cooling, and to draw heat off the GPU even a simple cooler will do. Sure, you can't call the cooling system of the Triplex GeForce4 Ti4200-8x cheap, on the other hand it's not as sophisticated as it seems.
The cooler looks big only from the outside because of the big plate installed on top. This plate serves mainly for guiding the air flux from the fan attached on it to the memory chips, and of course to impart the board a more menacing look. There are no radiators on the memory chips positioned over the front side of the video card, so the cooling of chips is done only by the air flux coming from the fan.
However, on the reverse side of the video card there is heat distributor - am aluminum plate adjoining the memory chips and the PCB from the reverse side of the GPU. However strange that may be, but between the memory chips and the heat distributor there is no thermal interface - a thermopaste, or synthetic spacer (a thin layer of the thermal paste is applied only over the GPU core surface). I presume if Triplex used at least silicon thermopaste, the memory would be been cooled better, which would facilitate overclocking the video card.
The cooler is easy to remove from the video card and we can see the type of video memory with the graphics core version used.
Here the core is marked as GeForce4 Ti4200-8x, core revision A1. Note that the PCB indeed has some sort of silvery coating applied over all the PCB surface but for the places where there are board contact elements. Over here, the silvery coating might cause a short-circuit, so the places where the PCB's current-carrying elements appear look simply like white spots. Look at the video memory chips:
On the Triplex GeForce4 Ti4200-8x video card, DDR SDRAM memory featuring 4.0 ns cycle time is used. Also, in the reference video card of nVidia's as well as in many other GeForce4 Ti4200-8x-based graphics boards, the memory here is slightly overclocked. The rated frequency of these chips is 250(500DDR) MHz, but here they are running at 256(513DDR) MHz.
To display image on the second display through a DVI-I-out, a Silicon Image Sil64CT64 transmitter is used. To perform the TV-out/Video-in functions, the Philips SAA 7108AE chip is used.
In all the other respects, the design of Triplex GeForce4 Ti4200-8x is standard. The positioning of the power supply components here is the same as in most other video cards built on the Ti4200-8x.
Of Triplex GeForce4 Ti4200-8x specific features, note only the heat distributor on the reverse side of the video card and the silver coating of the PCB. In all the other ways, it is a regular video card and only benchmarks will tell how the silver coating with the cooling system contribute to the overclocking. For now, let's take a look at another more advanced Triplex GeForce4 Ti4800SE video card.
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