MSI Ti4600 versus Gainward Ti4400

Videocards/VGA Reviews by jmke @ 2002-05-13

Back in January 2002 I started testing and reviewing videocards that were kindly "donated" by Comtechnology. With the purpose to create one big, massive comparative review. However due to website coding, public relations and real life stuff I was running abit behind schedule.

I hope you will find something interesting in this article. The info I collected is posted, together with benchmarks and a whole collection of pictures.

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Introduction

Introduction:

All videocards used in these benchmarks and reviews were kindly "donated" by ! Comtechnology! , I would like to thank them for being so kind to lend me these fine pieces of hardware

Test systems:

- Epox 8KHA+
- XP1600+ @ 1785Mhz
- 256Mb Corsair PC2400 RAM

Only SpecViewPerf bench was run on:
- Asus P4T-E
- Pentium 4 1.6@2.0Ghz
- 128Mb Apacer RDRAM


Gainward Ti4400

The Gainward comes in a flashy box sporting the statement: "Golden Sample"
This leads to believe that this videocard is pretty high quality, and overclocking should be a success. Let"s hope so...

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(click to zoom)

Contents of Box

In the box you will find these items:
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- The Videocard (duh!)
- An extensive user manual
- CD with drivers and overclocking/tweaking utilities
- CD with InterVideo Software
- CD with the game Serious Sam
- CD with WinDVD player
- A DVI-to-VGA Adapter
- Splittor to VIVO
- a "Powered by Gainward" Casebadge(click here to see)

The Card

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The front and back of the card in a nice color , click to zoom

While I was placing the card I noticed it was alot bigger then the previous nvidia cards. So I decided to compare them

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Here you see the card lying under a GF3 Ti500 you notice that the GF4 is longer and higher!
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Top to bottom, GF4 Ti4400 , GF3 Ti500, GF2 Ultra

Overclocking

The DDR ram on the Gainward is Samsung 3.6ns, which corresponds to 550Mhz total.
If you install all the utilities provided by Gainward, you get to chose a normal and enhanced mode. In normal the card works at 275/550, enchanced overclocks the card to 280/580. This gives a very slight boost in performance

3DMark2001 Default Bench 1024x768 32bit:
- Normal: 10877
- Enhanced: 10925

Quake 3 1600x1200 32bit MAX detail demo2:
- Normal: 126
- Enhanced: 131

Jedi Knight II 1600x1200 32bit MAX detail:
- Normal: 81
- Enhanced: 83

This improvement is not noticeable in games. So I decided to see how far I could push this card. Without any extra cooling & in a closed case enviroment I got the card stable at 310/610.Core speed is more then Ti4600 default (320), memory speed would do better if extra cooling was applied, but I was aiming for average working situation.

Not gaming related

While testing this card I was very pleased with the 2D quality in Windows. Playing DVD"s was a joy. But I didn"t stop there.
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a DVI-to-VGA converter connected at the back
I connected a second screen and after one reboot I was enjoying full dualscreen pleasures!
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watching movies and surfing the net becomes a reality
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