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Video cards roundup: MSI versus Triplex (GeForce4 Ti4200-8x & Ti4800SE) ReviewDate: 04/04/2003
IntroductionA little time has passed since nVidia announced its graphics chips on the base of the GeForce4 Titanium core with support for AGP8x. Video cards manufacturers got an excellent opportunity to renew their product lines, and the end users have grown more hesitant at choosing the right video card. Mind you, it's not easy to tell Ti4200, Ti4200-8x, Ti4600, Ti4800SE and Ti4800 apart. All these are different graphics chipsets and video cards with different frequencies and speed performance. Unfortunately, manufacturers are constrained to cut down on production costs and make their cards more attractive to sell to appeal to the buyers' tastes. Some save practically on every PCB and design element, some resort to their well-known name, others to advertising campaigns. Somehow or other, when the user selects one of ten video cards in a shop it's sometimes emotions play more important part in choice rather than the information on the manufacturers, or even the price if it doesn't differ much. But when it comes to the exterior, the cooler is the best companion, however strange that may sound. A video card with a large cooler packed in a nice-looking box with the same price always has advantages over competitors' products. In this review, we'll be comparing three video cards based on the GeForce4 Ti4200-8x and GeForce4 Ti4800SE chips made by Triplex and MSI. But before getting round to the description, let's draw up a table of GeForce4 Titanium graphics chips.
So, what do the new video chips look like? Many of us remember how nVidia loudly announced the GeForce4 MX440-8x chip with support for AGP8x, after that the company a bit quieter announced the GeForce4 Ti4200-8x, and no sooner had video cards built on the GeForce4 Ti4800SE started hitting the retail, of which no word was mentioned on the website, a lot of hype went up. In fact, all proved to be pretty simple: GeForce4 Ti4800SE is in fact the same GeForce4 Ti4400, but with support for AGP 8x. Along with that video chip, nVidia is producing the GeForce4 Ti4800 (without the 'SE' abbreviation), that is an AGP8x-version of the famous GeForce4 Ti4600. Therefore, it turns out that nVidia revived the GeForce4 Ti4400 chip formerly laid off since it hindered sales of the GeForce4 Ti4200 and GeForce4 Ti4600. It is naive to assume that Ti4800SE having high numbers its name will run much faster than GeForce4 Ti4400 or even GeForce4 Ti4600. Another 'pifall' in here is that the 'SE' version of Ti4800 features lower frequencies and thus will run slower than Ti4800 without the 'SE'. TriplexTriplex company is relatively a novice of the market of computer components. It became widely known for its smart silver-plated PCBs. As Triplex engineers say, the silver plating of the PCB favor to a better heat sink off the memory chips and GPU as well as better protection against induction currents generated by numerous fields inside the computer. As a result, as the manufacturer claims, their video cards are distinguished for more stable operation and better overclocking. Let us verify this claim in our review.
Triplex GeForce4 Ti4200-8xThe 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.
Triplex GeForce4 Ti4800SEThe GeForce4 Ti4800SE graphics chip costs a step higher than the Ti4200-8x, and the difference in approach to video cards based on these GPUs is already significant. Primarily because of the cost (on the date of writing this article the Triplex Ti4800SE card cost 1.4 times higher than Triplex Ti4200-8x). First of all, the shipment of the Triplex Ti4800SE card: these video cards sell in gleamy aluminum cases with a pair of locks and a transparent window in the lateral wall.  The video card itself rests on black foam-rubber, with two gleamy radiators on the memory chips below... All this resembles a James Bond's kit. I won't argue, this is one of the best packages for video cards I have ever seen.  Under the thick layer of foam-rubber inside the case there are usual accessories of the video card - a couple of CDs, a User's manual, cables for plugging in video equipment, the already familiar VIVO splitter, a S-Video-composite adapter and a DVI-VGA adapter. Take a look at the video card itself. In fact, the situation with Ti4800SE-based boards is a bit unclear. Some of them feature the design of Ti4200-8x's and regular DDR SDRAM memory, others have the design of Ti4600's and therefore the DDR SDRAM memory in the BGA case. The Triplex Ti4800SE video card falls within just the latter type.  As you can see from the photo, it is a full-sized AGP video card with the PCB inherited from the GeForce4 Ti4600. The video card's GPU has the same cooler as it is on Triplex GeForce4 Ti4200-8x cards, but the memory cooling was given most focus by Triplex engineers.  On each pair of chips there is a double radiator. It is made up of two aluminum radiators connected with one another. Radiators installed on the video card's front panel are blown by the air coming from the fan on the GPU cooler. So the memory on the front side is intensely cooled. But what about the reverse side of the video card? On the reverse side of the video card, there are four DDR SDRAM chips. By default, no radiators are installed on these memory chips, but they are shipped as bundled items to the video cards, so the user will have to fit them on his own.  Note that equally high radiators are installed on the front side of the video card. Today many video card manufacturers are installing thin heat distributor plates or low radiators on the reverse side of graphics cards. Due to safety reasons, this is the right solution - an expansion card installed above the AGP video card won't rest against the video card's cooling system. But in modern motherboards featuring no other expansion ports above the AGP port this precaution does not make sense, and nothing prevents the user from installing full-featured radiators on the chips behind the video card, the way Triplex suggests that we should do.  On each of the radiators there is a thick adhesive pad made of thermal-transfer material. It suffices to remove the protective film and press it to the memory chips to make the radiator sit firmly in place. They glue so strongly that will never fall off, although you can remove them if necessary.  On the video card there is Samsung DDR SDRAM memory marked as K4D26323RA-GC2B and placed into a BGA case featuring 2.8 access time. That means the rated memory frequency is 7 14 MHz. Since the default operation speed of the memory is 550 MHz, we arrive at the conclusion that the video card is simply designed for overclocking and it is unfavorable to ignore its overclocking.  Having removed the cooler from the video card, we can see the GeForce4 Ti4800SE chip itself. However strange that may be, but the chip does not show its precise marking. That is, its says Ti-8x, but there is no the 4800 marking here. To display image on the second display through a DVI-I-out, a regular Silicon Image Sil64CT64 transmitter is used. To perform the TV-out/Video-in functions, the Philips SAA 7108AE chip is used. All in all, of the Triplex Ti4800SE's specific features noteworthy are the Ti4600's design, BGA-format memory and big radiators on all the memory chips. And of course we can't ignore the memory whose minimum frequency is a bit higher than that at which it runs by default. Let's see what it will result in during overclocking, but for now let's turn to the third video card, MSI Ti4800SE.
MSI GeForce4 Ti4800SEAt our test lab, we received an MSI GeForce4 Ti4800SE video card, to be more specific - its VIVO make (MS-8900). MSI has been long known for its video cards, and GeForce4 Ti4800SE based video cards are made to be the best buy. These cards come shipped in big colored cardboard boxes that along with the card itself have a splitter (the same as that for Triplex cards) to connect video equipment, cables, a DVI->VGA adapter and as many as 10 CDs. We can't get appealed by the package bundle, so let's see what this video card is like.  The video card is made on a PCB covered with red lacquer. This card inherits the PCB design of Ti4600's, which means BGA video memory is also used in it. On the front side of the card there a big enough cooler which we'll be looking at in what follows. For now, let's take a look at the reverse side of the video board.  As you can see, about half the area of the video card from the rear is covered with a heat distributor plate. This plate adjoins the four memory chips on the reverse side of the video board and the section positioned right under the video card core. On the whole, the cooling system on the MSI Ti4800SE looks no less effective than that on Triplex GeForce4 Ti4800SE. But let's sort this out how the cooling system of the video card is designed.  In general, the cooling system somehow resembles that of Abit OTES. A copper radiator made of thin plate bent into a sheaf of fins is placed on an orange aluminum plate, with the whole structure closed by a transparent plastic housing on the top. Note that the radiator base, the part adjoining the GPU and memory chips is made of aluminum and painted to look like "copper". Only the fins sinking most of the heat from the GPU are made of copper. Part of the air flux from the fan extends to all the fins, with the other part extended upwards to make the air cool that part of the aluminum plate which touches the two memory chips on the top at the front side of the video card.  As you see, the memory installed on the front side is cooled forcedly by the air flux coming from the fan. The memory installed on the rear side of the video card is cooled only by the installed flat plate of the heat distributor. Sure, this cooling of the memory is not as affective as that of radiators installed on Triplex video cards, but the way it is is better than nothing. But in the end, the overclocking potentials of a video card depend on the type of memory chips installed.  Unfortunately, pretty cheap HY5DU283222F-36 memory chips made by Hynix are installed on this card. This video card features 3.6 ns cycle time, that is the rated clock speed is 550 MHz. That means, the memory already runs at its default speed and thus has no overclocking margin as Triplex cards do.  The GeForce4 Ti4800SE video chip itself is also fully marked. Unlike the Triplex GeForce4 Ti4800SE video card, an A2 version chip is installed here, so we'll see how good or bad the chip will be at overclocking. On the MSI GeForce4 Ti4800SE, there is also a Silicon Image Sil64CT64 transmitter responsible for image output to the DVI-out and Philips SAA 7108AE that contributes to the functioning of the video-in and TV-out. Well, it's high time we tested all the three video cards and find out which of them runs faster and overclocks better..
OverclockingFirst thing first, let's see how the tested video cards rank at overclocking. All the video cards were tested in a computer with the case cover removed to prevent from the temperature effect from other heating elements (HDD, processor, memory). No additional cooling was fitted on the video cards. The overclocking results have been summed up into this table:
As was expected, Triplex GeForce4 Ti4800SE was the leader at overclocking. The memory on that video card was able running at 710 MHz, i.e. at the rated value it is designed. Surprisingly, the core on all the video cards was hardly able overclocking to frequencies higher than 300 MHz. The thing is that 305 MHz is the factual limit for the GeForce4 Titanium core. Even Ti4600-based video cards whose nominal frequency is 300/650 MHz in most cases are unable increasing the core speed by more than 5 MHz. Of course, there are exceptions, but they are rare. Benchmarking
The main goal of our benchmarking session was to compare the speeds of the video cards in question in the rated and overclocked modes. But before moving on to the speeds, let's talk about the 2D quality. As is known, soaped fonts in 2D can spoil the good impression of the video card however fast it runs. Both the Triplex video cards pleased us with the high image quality. There was no "soap" at higher resolutions, and the video cards appeared to offer as high a quality as declared by Triplex. But what about the MSI's video card? Things at that are going much worse. The 2D quality of this video card is simply ugly. I haven't come across that poor quality for quite a long while. Already at 1024x768 with the refresh rate 100 Hz the screen fonts look heavily blurred and you feel like switching to a lower refresh rate. In view of the luxurious package bundle of this video card and the smart way the cooling system is implemented, it seems rather strange that MSI decided to cut down on quality L-C filters. Well, let's move on to the benchmarking. All the tests were done with the drivers set to "default", at 32-bit color depth and at 1024x768, 1280x1024, 1600x1200 resolutions. Unreal Tournament 2003The first of the benchmarks used is Unreal Tournament 2003. This gaming benchmark is the most impartial tool for assessing the video performance in modern 3D FPS games. Unreal Tournament 2003 runs through Direct3D APIs using DirectX 7 instructions. For tests, we used the built-in Fly-by Antalus benchmark. In the game, all the graphics settings were set to "maximum".  As you can see, at the rated mode the MSI Ti4800SE is faster than Triplex Ti4800SE. When overclocked, the Triplex Ti4800SE wins quite a little but anyway takes the leadership. This is rather strange - the Triplex's Ti4800SE card was able to overclock better both at the core speed and at the video speed. CodecreaturesThis is one of the most demanding and resource-hungry benchmarks for video cards. At that, the most part is played by the core speed and memory speed of the video card. Let's see how the results of tested cards are distributed.  Again we see that at the nominal frequencies the MSI Ti4800SE takes the crown. In the overclocked mode at 1024x768, the Triplex Ti4800SE takes the first place. In general, CodeCreatures is a real torture both for the CPU and GPU. So the performance difference between the two video cards is relatively small. AquaMark v 2.0The AquaMark 2.0 benchmark vividly demonstrates the gaming performance in Aquanox. Soon the third version of this benchmark is coming with support for pixel shaders, and to date the AquaMark 2.0 still makes use of DirectX 7 instructions. The capacity of textures used was set to 24 MB. In this benchmark, the core speed of the video card plays a more important part than the video memory speed.  Again, we see that without overclocking but still at the nominal frequencies the leadership is taken by MSI Ti4800SE. When overclocked, MSI lost some score points to the contender starting from the 1280x1024 resolution. In the overclocked mode, Triplex Ti4200-8x lags well behind the boards based on Ti4800SE, since in this benchmark it is the GPU speed that plays the major part. The difference in frequencies between the 710 MHz (in Triplex Ti4800SE) and 585 MHz (in Triplex Ti4200-8x) is as high as 125 MHz, with the difference in speed at Aquanox being no more than 3 fps. So, for AquaNox it's not a big deal of a difference between Ti4200-8x and Ti4800SE. 3DMark03 Despite the rows going on around 3DMark03, this benchmark is quite suitable for testing modern video cards. The first benchmark - Game 1 Wings of Fury - demonstrates the behavior of the tested video cards in a simple game scene powered by DirectX 7.  This is a pretty easy test. It is easy for both the video card and the processor, so we can see that as the frequencies of video memory and video chip the speeds go up essentially. In the rated mode as usual MSI Ti4800SE performs faster, but the Triplex Ti4800SE when overclocked nevertheless takes a lead albeit the speed difference is quite negligible.   These benchmarks - Game 2 and Game 3 - are aimed at video chips more powerful than GeForce4 Titanium, so all the tested video cards perform pretty low here. So low that it is not quite correct to compare them with one another. Conclusions We tested the video cards on a powerful and fast enough PC with the Athlon XP 2600+ processor and 512 MB DDR333 memory. Even on that pretty modern system I can't see any essential difference between video cards based on the GeForce4 Ti4200-8x and GeForce4 Ti4800SE chips. How comes the difference may be seen if the rated frequencies of the graphic chips on these video cards differ by merely 25 MHz and the memory frequencies by 19(38DDR) MHz.
The price difference between the Ti4200-8x and Ti4800SE is considerable and unfortunately as substantial as in speeds between these video cards. Therefore, as for the comparison of video cards based on Ti4200-8x and Ti4800SE, then basing on the benchmarking results there is a one-one conclusion - the Triplex GeForce4 Ti4200-8x is a better buy than Triplex GeForce4 Ti4800SE and MSI Ti4800SE. Ignoring the mercantile aspect and looking at the video cards regardless of their prices, there is much to think about. In fact, the Triplex Ti4200-8x stands out with merely the silvery coating on the PCB. The video card features regular TSOP memory, so it's unlikely to show extraordinary overclocking results. The package bundle is standard although it doesn't play the leading part. The impression of the MSI Ti4800SE card is not that straightforward. On the one hand, this board is very fast which at rated speeds runs even faster than Triplex Ti4800SE. Probably, its because of revision A2 of the graphics chip, or maybe the way the memory timings are configured. Because of the cheap memory installed, the video card doesn't overclock much but nevertheless runs fast. The package bundle is abundant with CDs and cables ... But all the good impression of the vide card is blurred by the ugly 2D quality, so I wouldn't recommend to buy MSI Ti4800SE. Triplex Ti4800SE runs slower than MSI Ti4800SE. Triplex decided not to cut down on fast memory to make the video card more overclocker-friendly. However, as the benchmarks show, the overclocking boost as compared to MSI Ti4800SE is not that great. On the other hand, Triplex GeForce4 Ti4800SE does not have problems with 2D quality, and the aluminum case in which the card is packed is simply fantastic. I would recommend to buy the Triplex GeForce4 Ti4800SE card to those looking for a board based just on the Ti4800SE or those wishing to make a nice gift to the beloved person, or to the computer enthusiast. We are highly appreciated to "Inline" company for the courtesy of providing us with the Triplex GeForce4 Ti4200-8x and Triplex GeForce4 Ti4800SE video cards and MSI company for the provided MSI GeForce4 Ti4800SE video card.
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